WHICH THRILL?: The folly of human science unleashes a horde of giant ants – can a Brazilian army Captain and an indigenous Amazon youth possibly stop them?

DESPERATE BUT NOT SERIOUS

1978’s final shot at a B-Movie Sci-Fi story in 2000AD is the most lurid of all, a Latin American remix of previous man-eating monster yarns Flesh and Shako which borrows ideas from both and filters them through the mind of Gerry Finley-Day, a writer with a strong eye for the sensational and a rather looser grip on plot or logic. The specific inspiration for Ant Wars is generally claimed as 1954’s classic monster movie Them! but readers might have recalled a review in the 1978 Sci-Fi Special of Empire Of The Ants, a much less respectable (but much more recent) B-Movie outing starring Joan Collins. Whatever the source, someone decided ants were worth a shot.

So Finley-Day becomes the third of 2000AD’s godfathers to try his hand at a beasts-on-the-loose story. He doesn’t have the fury of Mills in Flesh or the gleefully dark outlook of Wagner in Shako, and Ant Wars doesn’t stand comparison to those stories even before you start on its more obviously troubling elements. But he does have a gung-ho pulp sensibility that’s a good fit for a deeply formulaic strip, and means Ant Wars pulls off moments of magnificent stupidity.

That formula is easy to outline. Every week or two, Captain Villa of the Brazilian army and Amazonian tribesman “Ant Eater” encounter some people who refuse to believe their story of a horde of giant mutated ants. Said horde immediately turns up and eats everyone, except the leads who kill an ant or two and get away. The story climaxes with this playing out in Rio, which the ants entirely sack, except then there’s another several weeks of formic fun as the strip plays its man-eating hits until the Star Lord merger calls a halt to it.

It’s familiar stuff from earlier strips, going back to the antics of Hook Jaw in Action. Readers enjoyed seeing fools scoff at creatures and then be vivisected by them, and Ant Wars has plenty of delightful scenes on those lines. In the strip’s single best moment, a pompous general declares the ants aren’t real just as one smashes through the window behind him. 

But what made Flesh, and particularly Shako, stand out, was a commitment to a kind of pseudo-realism. The writing implied that the rampages of Old One Eye or Shako were rooted in some kind of biological truth, as if Roger Corman and David Attenborough were collaborating on telling these stories. Part of this is that a lot of the story was told from the monster’s eye view, recasting the terror meted on humans as simple animal instinct – curiosity, hunger, and only latterly rage.

Finley-Day is a lot less interested in the documentary element of his creature feature. In the early episodes of Ant Wars the strip keeps its ants’ behaviour roughly within the bounds of the species’ encyclopaedia entry. But when the story demands the ants be smart, Finley-Day follows the story not the science. A few episodes in they start to make boats out of leaves, and by the time we get to Rio they’re hiding under the wheels of carnival floats to sneak into the city. We see a BBC cameraman filming the resulting slaughter (for Alan Whicker analogue “Alan Hacker”) as the ants destroy Rio. Then we’re told that luckily the incident has been contained and nobody in the outside world knows about it.

Ant Wars shrugs off its plot holes as easily as the ants later shrug off multiple nuclear strikes, but it’s worth pointing out that this story is unusually ludicrous even for early 2000AD, since that tallies with the rest of what we know about the strip and the editorial conditions when it ran. Ant Wars behind the scenes is best known for an incident described by Kevin O’Neill – the art director at the time – when the strip’s Spanish artist Azpiri sent over his pages for the Rio carnival episode, complete with a prominent topless dancer. O’Neill, who was pissed off with IPC management for their continued interference, chose to let it run to give his senior nemesis Bob Bartholomew conniptions. Bartholomew, apparently, didn’t even notice.

What did get O’Neill in trouble on Ant Wars was his decision an issue later to do a cover in the style of a tabloid newspaper, swapping out the usual logo and cover dress for a Sun-style headline. Bold artistically, but a branding and distribution nightmare, though as with the topless woman it was only noticed after the prog had gone to press.

In other words, Ant Wars was being produced at a time of unusual editorial looseness for 2000AD, when – as we’ll see in the Star Lord entries – relationships between staff and management were on the brink of falling apart. This may also be why Finley-Day’s plotting wasn’t better reined in. And I wonder if it may even explain some of what’s going on with “Ant Eater”.

RIDICULE IS NOTHING TO BE SCARED OF

In terms of the strip’s actual action, “Ant Eater” is plainly the hero of Ant Wars – he appears on the story’s introductory cover, a young Amazonian native defiantly holding a spear as a huge ant looms above him and the world. He is also easily the most competent human in the strip when it comes to fighting the ants. What stands out when you read it, though, is his treatment by the other characters in the strip.

Our other protagonist, Captain Villa, is grotesquely racist toward Ant Eater – he’s the one who gives the boy his name, based on his using ants as a food source, and at first constantly calls him disgusting, mocking his lack of “civilized” behaviour. Villa’s attitudes are not unusual – in fact almost every white South American in the story shows equal contempt for Ant Eater. By the end of the story, Villa has undergone a clear change of heart – he asks after Ant Eater when the two are hospitalised, intervenes to rescue him, and shares a heroic last stand against the ants.

But what stands out for a modern reader is that at no point does Villa ever admit he was mistaken about Ant Eater, let alone apologise or even treat him as much of a person. It’s impossible to imagine a writer doing this kind of plotline now without a beat where Ant Eater tells Villa, or is asked, his actual name, for instance; in Ant Wars we never learn it. It’s worth remembering this storyline was running simultaneously with the Tweak plot in Judge Dredd, which is absolutely explicit that Spikes Harvey Rotten’s very similar prejudices – even unto Tweak’s choice of diet – are stupid. And while Ant Eater gradually gets more articulate as the strip progresses he never graduates to becoming the point of view character in the way Buck Dollar – his closest equivalent in Shako – eventually does. The narrative constantly introduces him as “semi-civilized”, an “Indian” or a “savage”. Which leaves tricky questions about Ant Wars’ actual relationship with its characters’ racism.

There’s no question the reader is meant to think Villa’s racism is wrong – it’s so prominent, and so outrageous, that it’s clearly a major plot point. But as the story progresses, I get the sense that racism is wrong not because it’s morally or ethically wrong, but because it makes the efforts to fight the giant ants less effective. Ant Eater is simply much better at ant-slaying than Villa, and obviously more intelligent (as in any creature-feature strip, most of the human characters are enjoyably stupid). But the strip often takes the position that it’s not his intelligence that makes him effective against the ants, it’s his deeper understanding of them granted by his “semi-civilized” status and jungle knowledge. “Don’t be prejudiced against ‘savages’: they might know stuff” is the lesson – if lesson there is – of Ant Wars.

And even Ant Eater’s effectiveness is played for irony – Finley-Day enjoys set-ups where the boy does something obviously ‘uncivilized’, like tasting petrol, only for it to be the key to defeating that week’s batch of ants. Ant Eater is a rung below even a “noble savage” stereotype like Buck Dollar, who is able to take on Shako because he is somehow more deeply in touch with the land the bear dwells in. He’s an ignoble savage whose apparent clowning is flipped into plot resolution. For all that Ant Wars is a romp, it’s also a deeply uncomfortable read in places, a story which explicitly positions racism as bad while constantly indulging in it.

Wrapped around the problem of Ant Eater is a whole other set of stereotypes, less difficult to deal with but emblematic of 2000AD’s relationship with the foreign. Ant Wars is wholly set in South America, which means Finley-Day gets to tick boxes on a list of “South American stuff” for the ants to munch through, and have everyone call each other “amigo”. We see Rio carnival! Gauchos! Football fans, since it’s a World Cup year (the football fans, to be fair, are Scottish, and their grim fate is one of the most fondly-remembered elements of the strip). My favourite of all these is a set of gun-toting rebels led by the beret-clad “Gavara”: “the ants are not my enemy!” he declares. But like the government he hates, he too refuses to take the ant threat seriously until it’s too late.

Initially I wondered if the South American setting was because the editors knew the strip would be using Argentine and Brazilian artists, as, like most makeweight 2000AD and Star Lord strips of this era the art was sourced via an agency for overseas creators. But no – all four of the artists on Ant Wars are Spanish. The most notable is Azpiri, he of the topless carnival dancer and a feathery style a bit like Ian Gibson’s: he went on to a long association with Heavy Metal where he could (and did) draw boobs to his heart’s content. 

Neither he, launch artist Jose Luis Ferrer, or the two creators who sign on for a fill-in episode apiece do anything more or less than a professional job. But once you’ve seen one ant, it turns out you’ve seen them all, and while the artists have the typical Spanish school flair for expressive characters and fluid action, even their Queen Ants lack menace (Kevin O’Neill’s cover for one Prog has a sense of grotesquerie the actual story could have handily used). It’s another way this strip can’t match Flesh or Shako, both of which benefited hugely from getting Ramon Sola on board to call forth the gory spirit of their starring beasts.

Ultimately the South American setting allows Finley-Day to do the kind of episodic routines he wants – the continent has the right balance of wilderness and city to make a monster threat from the interior work. But as we’ll see repeatedly, early 2000AD has a curious affinity for South America, and particularly for characters where the writers can use a kind of Speedy Gonzalez cartoon accent. (Ant Wars ees spared from thees) The only other nationality which gets this sort of repeated treatment are Japanese characters. Ant Wars isn’t the most egregious example of 2000AD’s love of stereotyping – which is certainly not evenly shared across every writer – but it feels like a good place to start thinking about it.

The simplest explanation is that, for all that 2000AD is genuinely a groundbreaking comic, it’s also a British one, and Britain in the 1970s was a more insular place than it even is now, very enamoured of comedy characters whose defining trait was that they were foreign. Most of 2000AD’s Mexican and Spanish comic relief sits downstream of Fawlty Towers’ Manuel, for instance (and often cartooning skill elevates them in the same way Andrew Sachs’ physical performance elevates the Manuel character). When you’re cranking out stories to a weekly deadline, you’re likely to reach for easy material sometimes, and hot-blooded Mexicans and geeky Japanese tourists are certainly that.

It is interesting to me, though, that the nationalities 2000AD reaches for most often as a source of comedy in its first decade are the ones with limited historical connection to Britain. The writers and editors are not tapping into the kinds of racist comedy that were rife and controversial in 1970s Britain, the ones aimed at the significant minority populations who actually lived here. IPC titles – 2000AD included – tended to downplay or ignore the existing diversity of Britain, and future strips like Skizz which make a point of it are startling because of that. But they were also careful not to use Black or South Asian people for laughs. The comedy Mexican seemed a safer way to get mileage from ethnic humour, and like most things in 2000AD that have aged terribly, it wasn’t expected to age at all.

Nor was the comic itself. The structure of Ant Wars is unusual – it has a very clear ending 9-10 episodes in with the ant takeover of Rio and our heroes’ destruction of the Queen, but then it just keeps going for another six weeks (more Queens unhelpfully turn up). I’d speculate Finley Day was asked to extend the series and produce more scripts, especially as the false climax happens in the progs that were in preparation when John Sanders of IPC made his final decision on the fate of 2000AD and Star Lord.

Once the merger date was fixed, the clock could run out on Ant Wars, which bows out with the deaths of Villa and Ant Eater and one final ludicrous contrivance: everyone happily agrees to cover up a US nuclear strike on the Andes. Ant Wars isn’t quite the last hurrah of the creature rampage story – Kelvin Gosnell had a sequel to Flesh ready to take its place – but it’s the end of the standalone B-Movie strips which characterise the Gosnell-Landau editorial era and its conception of science fiction.

These had not been a success, and while no comic with The Cursed Earth in could be bad, it’s hard to agree with Pat Mills’ judgement that this was a minor golden era for 2000AD. The obvious and correct impression you get from 2000AD and Star Lord for most of summer 1978 is of a set of creators stretched desperately thin and commissioning second- or third-rate material to try and get their titles out of the door. What’s more, this flailing around was happening just as the predicted sci-fi craze finally arrived, leaving 2000AD running stories riffing on a godawful Joan Collins film as the kids were going mad for droids, aliens, and lightsabers.

According to John Sanders, writing with extensive hindsight, it was only his faith in the potential of 2000AD that saved the comic: Starlord was supposedly selling better, and in any case seemed much more in tune with the new spirit of the sci-fi age. But what was the background to Sanders’ decision? To answer that I’m going to try and reconstruct the story of Star Lord, and the most chaotic summer in 2000AD’s history.

HOW TO READ IT: Ant Wars has its own collection from Rebellion, which also collects 2005’s Judge Dredd semi-sequel Zancudo, that I haven’t read.

RECOMMENDED?: I think this is a bit of a “you had to be there” one – it’s fondly remembered and it’s better than a lot of the post-launch pre-merger crop but the Ant Eater material is tough going.

NEXT PROG: Before we take a detour into the world of Star Lord it’s time to see what’s in Tharg’s alien bran tub as I rank 1978’s FUTURE SHOCKS from worst to best.

WHICH THRILL?: A colony ship crashes on an extremely hostile planet. Can Captain Lorna Varn keep the survivors safe?

ANOTHER GIRL, ANOTHER PLANET

As the history of comics in other countries becomes better known here, we can put Fleetway’s collection of Latin American freelancers into greater perspective. To the 2000AD reader, Francisco Solano Lopez is just the artist on one of the Prog’s least successful stories (though nobody – except, as we’ll see, the writer – blamed Death Planet’s inadequacies on him). Take a less insular view, though, and Lopez is something of a catch for the comic, particularly in 2025, when his late 50s co-creation The Eternaut has a deluxe Fantagraphics reissue and an acclaimed Netflix adaptation. His co-creator on The Eternaut juggled writing comics with a day job as a guerilla leader resisting the Argentine junta, and ended up being disappeared. (You wonder what Lopez made of the ‘anti-authoritarian’ themes of 2000AD in the context).

Solano Lopez doesn’t seem to have got much of his Fleetway work from the girls’ comics, and the closest he came to romance was a later bit of lesbian smut for Eros, Young Witches. And yet Death Planet is, unmistakably, a romance comic, or at least involves the triangles and tropes of a romance story, stripped back and refitted into 2000AD format. The set-up makes it obvious: ambitious working woman Lorna Varn is introduced alongside her handsome but somewhat strait-laced colleague Mike. Before long Lorna is thrown into a situation where her professional skills are useless, and she’s brought together with rough diamond Richard Corey. What starts as hatred becomes respect, and the tension between Corey and Varn creates the strip’s drama until fate throws them together – too late! As the two are on the verge of confessing their feelings Corey is eaten by a giant alien bird.

This weird mirror of a romance plot is the closest 2000AD could have come to the topic. Gruesome violence, threatened lynching and forced suicide all got the 2000AD boys hauled over the coals. And yet a single snog between Richard Corey and Lorna Varn would have been more unthinkable than any of those – the gender barrier is the one boundary Tharg would absolutely not push against. It’s years before a 2000AD character has any kind of successful or serious love story, decades before one becomes the actual motor for a series.

As we talked about with The Visible Man, this wasn’t because of any overt misogyny from the creators, who all worked for girls’ comics and in most cases took a lot of pride in the quality of their output. IPC titles like Jinty and Misty could easily incorporate science fiction or horror, and Pat Mills among others spent a lot of time trying to apply some of the successful story techniques from the girls’ titles on 2000AD. But Tharg’s comic existed within a corporate-enforced, highly stratified construct of what boys and girls liked to read which was even less porous on the boys’ side. Once kids left the primary-school innocence of Buttons and Playdays behind they were segregated, and this segregation reached its peak with comics for the 8-12s, where simply to include major women characters in a boys’ comic was a radical proposition.

Action had pushed back against this at times. One of the most endearing elements of football strip Look Out For Lefty was the hero’s girlfriend, Angie, who first appears when Lefty takes the mickey out of her for listening to the Bay City Rollers and bites back at him for his Pink Floyd fandom. She’s a swaggering skinhead girl, in keeping with the strip’s early vibe as a sort of Richard Allen meets Roy Of The Rovers piece. It’s Angie, in fact, who throws a bottle from the stands in the notorious “Kids Rule OK” covered issue that got Action banned – something that surely contributed to the spluttering outrage around it. After the ban, Lefty continued but Angie was put firmly in her place, losing her attitude and her prominence to become a generic football girlfriend type.

In many IPC comics, romance was even rarer. The first issue of Misty, IPC’s big early 1978 launch, has 10 male speaking parts, but no boys aside from a pesky kid brother. They’re almost all authority figures like Dads or teachers, with a couple of mysterious old men. The peers of Misty heroines are girls their own age, all the better to isolate the lead character as her world gets stranger.

The leads of boys’ comics were generally not boys, but they lived in an even more segregated world. 2000AD Prog 50 came out the same week as Misty issue 1. It has five speaking parts for women, half the roles Misty gives to men, and there’s a major difference. All but the most minor – a receptionist in a Walter The Wobot strip – are in some sense adversarial. Frank Hart’s girlfriend reacts to him with horror. A sexy cheerleader in Inferno turns out to be a killer robot. Most threatening is Olga Volskaya, Bill Savage’s Volgan arch-enemy, a gross stereotype of an Eastern European strongwoman, like the weightlifters and shot-putters comedians had fun with for decades.

This selection is typical of early 2000AD, where even the fiercest female characters, like Old One-Eye (the “Hag Bitch”!) were tyrannical mother figures. A woman who could operate on the same level as one of the heroes was extremely rare – only Tanya, the bionic woman in MACH 1, fits the bill, and her fate is an inevitably tragic one.

Tanya’s story was written, like Death Planet, by Alan Hebden, an IPC stalwart in the late 70s and early 80s. Hebden disliked working on other people’s creations, and was also opposed to characters who he felt dragged on after their story had been told, preferences which in the long run made him a better fit for the war and adventure comics like Battle and Eagle and their turnover of shorter-run stories than for 2000AD under Steve MacManus. But he was also writing the well received Mind Wars in Star Lord, a post-Star Wars saga which actually caught some of the drama and grand scope of George Lucas’ epic (and got to the idea of heroic twins first, too). Mind Wars, with its boy and girl co-leads, let Hebden explore another storytelling interest – he was a believer “in equality” and wanted to explore women lead characters. Lorna Varn was a deliberate move towards that.

It only half worked. Hebden put some of the blame on the art, which he said made his tough spacer woman too “girly” in appearance. Though look at the cover of Prog 62, which introduced Varn to the readers, and it’s clear the editors were giving a female lead their best shot. The cover artist, Brian Lewis – who sadly died young at the end of 1978 – had dozens of SF magazine illustrations under his belt: his Lorna Varn has impeccable hair for a woman who’s just crashed on a killer planet but otherwise she fits Hebden’s bill. Varn is gun-toting, practically clothed and no-nonsense. 

Solano Lopez’ art for the series itself doesn’t quite live up to that. You can see Hebden’s point: Lopez has a habit of drawing Varn with a luscious pout and big, heavy-lashed eyes, no matter what peril she’s facing. While it’s hardly Barbarella, his approach makes sense of Hebden’s “girly” critique. But even if Solano Lopez and company had drawn Varn like an early version of Judge Hershey, Death Planet would not be remembered as a feminist classic, and the reason for that is firmly down to the writing.

Like Colony Earth and The Visible Man, it was designed as a short-run series. It could, in theory, have been extended for much longer, with the colonists facing more perils before their final confrontation with the slaver queen who rules the barely hospitable planet. In its collected edition it’s paired with the extremely similar Star Lord story Planet Of The Damned – a rush job, also by Alan Hebden, which strongly suggests that planetary survival stories just aren’t a great idea. But even at just 9 weeks, Death Planet doesn’t feel rushed, and part of the reason is that Lorna Varn actually gets to complete a character arc. It’s just a rather unflattering one.

Varn starts off as an officious jobsworth, whose callousness shocks her junior officer as she matter-of-factly refers to the suspended-animation colonists as “cargo”. When the ship crashes, she goes to pieces, with Cory taking a leadership role, and her attempts to reassert her authority over the group are terrible failures. In the most telling incident, Varn risks her life to rescue a young girl from a fire. Or rather, she wants to risk her life but is wrestled out of the way by Cory who tells her – and is proved correct – that it’s too late and the girl was doomed. By the end, though, Cory’s death – and the death of her slaver rival, who turns out to have been a former colleague of Varn’s – shakes her into a restored confidence, and we’re left with the impression she’ll become a strong leader of the unwilling colony.

This character development is more than almost any other 2000AD lead has had at this point – the Visible Man, a very sui generis strip, is the exception. But it’s character development which leans on a host of chauvinist stereotypes – a woman officer who simply isn’t up to the job when faced with a hostile environment, and whose most ‘feminine’ traits, like compassion and jealousy, almost get her killed. “I feel so – so HELPLESS” she cries, Lopez drawing her as a space ingenue with huge, pleading eyes, and at times – as with the fire sequence, it feels like Hebden is going out of his way to put his heroine in her place. Even in the final confrontation, Varn does almost nothing as Cory sacrifices himself to rid the planet of her enemy. It’s a redemption arc with no actual incident to justify the redemption.

Is this feeble treatment of a female lead a 2000AD problem, or a boys’ comics problem, or something else as well? 2000AD would eventually do better by its women characters than anyone reading Death Planet might suspect, and the failure of this story is partly a symptom of the general flailing around we’ve seen across the first half of 1978. With its strong sweeney-fi identity mostly fallen away, the comic has been running a series of strips in which hoary old B-Movie and pulp templates are adapted with macho man characters. Death Planet takes on the planetary romance – humans exploring a strange, alien environment – but we’ve also had the alien invasion, the freakish scientific experiments, and coming soon the creature feature. 

Only The Visible Man really works, mostly because Mills flips the script and refuses to give us a typical 2000AD hero. The rest of them fall flat, because “SF cliche with rugged action man” is just a retrograde version of SF. And this is what lays Death Planet low too. As soon as Hebden introduces Richard Cory, he takes over the story, because he’s the type of character 2000AD in its early phase is about. It’s Hebden’s choice to give Varn almost no wins against him, but as an adventure story with a strong woman lead character, the strip would be vastly better without him in it at all. (Cory’s prominence means we hardly see the other crew, which makes the point at which one betrays them a dramatic belly-flop).

And yet it’s Cory’s presence that gives Death Planet those strange flickers of a different and more interesting story underneath the survival action. That skeleton of an enemies-to-lovers romance plot is there all through the strip, building week by week until Cory’s final sacrifice. It’s a love that cannot speak its name for fear of grossing the readership out, and I doubt there’s any evidence of Varn/Cory shipping in the early fandom. But it’s in the comic. Death Planet ends up being a story that fails because it’s both too behind and too ahead of its time – a set of dreary macho cliches that’s a tweak or two away from being a truly bold experiment.

HOW TO READ IT: Death Planet is reprinted in the Planet Of The Damned and Death Planet collection from Rebellion. Planet Of The Damned is a Star Lord strip, which I’ll cover when I do Star Lord. Is it better than Death Planet? Stay tuned.

RECOMMENDED? Not really. It’s better plotted than Colony Earth but it’s a missed opportunity to say the least. There’s better from both creators out there.

NEXT PROG: The B-Movie era of 2000AD comes to an end – the ants are on the march in South America, so get ready for a nuanced and sensitive portrayal of the region in Ant Wars.

Which Thrill?: Future lawman Judge Dredd is sent on a mercy mission across a radioactive wasteland to bring a vaccine to a plague-hit city.

PUNK’S NOT DREDD

“The savage route across a blasted continent, teeming with monsters, deadly radiation, and insanely lethal storms…” – Back cover blurb to Damnation Alley (Roger Zelazny, 1969)

Judge Dredd advances a year at a time, unusual for a comic strip, and not made entirely explicit until later. Its New Year is ours. And so, as the strip’s continuity began in 2099, what we’re seeing in 1978 is the dawn of the 22nd Century. Dredd spends New Years Eve on the Moon, dealing with an office worker turned ‘futsie’, future shock victim. People are partying – people will always party – but the new century is not a cause for great optimism. As readers of Judge Dredd were about to learn, humanity didn’t make a brilliant job of the previous one.

“The Cursed Earth”, a 25-part epic which sees Dredd struggling through a radioactive wilderness to save Mega-City Two from a zombie plague, is at once one of the most straightforward and one of the strangest Judge Dredd stories. Straightforward because its throughline – will Dredd deliver the antidote in time? – is extremely simple, and gives Dredd the opportunity to act almost entirely as an action hero, away from his duties in Mega-City One. Strange, because this isn’t a tone readers now expect from Dredd, and because the story is extremely loose and episodic, lead writer Pat Mills enjoying the chance to cut loose and plot a story on the fly, outdoing himself week on week with bizarre threats on this travelogue across a twisted America.

Still, themes emerge – what does being the law mean in a region which doesn’t recognise it? What authorities emerge to take its place, and who do they recognise as fellow humans? These are ideas which will recur every time the strip revisits the Cursed Earth. Which it does, again and again, as the wasteland offers Judge Dredd an irresistible contrast to Mega-City One. There’s an argument that the city is the best character in Dredd, which makes it even weirder that the strip spends so much time in its first few years trying to get him away from it. But the Cursed Earth isn’t like Luna-1, a change of scene which ran out of steam after a few cowboy riffs. The Cursed Earth, far more than any rival city, is the opposite Mega-City One needs. 

As a place, The Cursed Earth can work in so many ways, and it’s startling how many of them turn up in this first look at it. The setting can work as a locus for contemporary political anxiety and allegory, particularly when the strip turns its attention to the territory’s mutant population. It can be a zone of Western-style adventure, stripping characters down to their wits and their essence as a way of raising the stakes. As the city is written as more and more oppressive, the Cursed Earth turns into a place where ideas of freedom and the frontier can be explored. And it can take on weirder roles, providing an otherworld on the city’s doorstep in which strange stories are told, a psychic space like Macbeth’s Blasted Heath where the rules of the strip are bent.

Dredd himself acknowledges that these rules don’t apply. His first action, on learning he has to enter this strange space, is to do the one thing that most goes against everything we know about him as a character: he unilaterally frees a lawbreaker. Dredd’s insistence on taking ‘punk’ biker Spikes Harvey Rotten with him into the Cursed Earth gets two in-story justifications. The first has some credibility: Rotten knows the territory, though it’s hard to imagine the Judges don’t have informants out in the wilderness who could help out. The second is bizarre. Judges are trained from age 5, and after the gun the bike is their main tool – is Spikes really a better rider than all of them? Except the justifications don’t matter next to the powerful symbolism of Dredd’s choice – the Cursed Earth is so outside the realm of the ordinary that he must override the operations of the Law, which is why it’s worth lingering on this initial choice a little longer.

What only a very few readers would have known is the other justification for taking Spikes – because Spikes Harvey Rotten is actually Hell Tanner, protagonist of Damnation Alley, the science fiction novel by Roger Zelazny on which the premise of the Cursed Earth is heavily based. There’s also a 1977 film of the book, but that didn’t get a UK release until 1979. (And it’s terrible, a testament to the visual power of the comics medium). Besides, it’s the novel that shares all the plot points with the 2000AD story. The fact that Hell Tanner is the last and greatest biker in the world. The fact he’s being recruited on the promise of a pardon. The fact that only enclaves of civilisation survive in America, and one of them is menaced by a plague. And, oh yes, the fact that the air route is impossible thanks to swirling storms of rocks and garbage, which periodically dump monsters on your head. 

This final detail, which translates into one of Mike McMahon’s most grotesque and memorable images, is the one that had me rolling my eyes at the cheek of this extensive lifting, which looks like one of the most outrageous “dead cribs” of all. And yet the telling of the adapted elements – from the zombie horror of ‘Red’ succumbing to the virus, to the Old Testament wrath of the leader in the damned, rat-infested town – is so brilliantly done it drives off any disappointment at the swiping. The Damnation Alley source feels like an example of editor Kelvin Gosnell’s long-stated desire to run sci-fi adaptations in 2000AD – we know “The Cursed Earth” is his request, and you can imagine him enthusing to Pat Mills in detail about the premise before Mills took that ball and ran with it. “The Cursed Earth” departs from Zelazny’s material soon enough.

For one thing – which seems small enough but which changes the story dynamic – the Hell Tanner character is not the protagonist, he’s the hero’s guide. Zelazny’s book involves an amoral man realising he does actually have a stake in humanity (while also asking how low humanity has to go for such people to identify with it). Dredd, on the other hand, is at his most moral in “The Cursed Earth”, finding that in the absence of the law he is often forced to fall back on justice.

Not that Dredd talks about justice. In fact this is the story where “I am the Law” becomes Dredd’s catchphrase, a mantra he invokes until the story’s final, totemic cover where the Law is all that’s keeping him going as he crawls through the Mojave desert. “I am the Law” has come to mean mostly a plain statement of total authority: Dredd is the living instrument of the Law of Mega-City One, the incarnate boundary within which correct action for its citizens is possible. But it also goes further: in the Cursed Earth, pushed into improvising by the bizarre situations he encounters, Dredd is most truly the Law itself, the arbiter of who its protection applies to and what it even is. And Dredd’s personal interpretation turns out to be a generous one: out in the wilderness he intercedes on behalf of mutants, aliens and artificial advertising mascots, invoking the Law as he does so.

“The Cursed Earth” is sometimes discussed as an outlier in Dredd history. Technically it is – the first really long Dredd story and the only such with Pat Mills as the lead writer. And it also feels different on the surface because of the straightforward heroism of Dredd’s mission and his drive to achieve it. The constant repetition of “I am the Law” is a reminder that this is not a distinct character or even a very different version of Dredd. Mills as a writer prefers his fascist characters less ambiguous, but here he squares the circle of writing the fascist as protagonist by having this phrase constantly remind us that he is both. Dredd’s total belief that he is the sole source of authority in the Cursed Earth is fused to him having lived his life with that same power in his city. 

Within Mega City One, “the Law” and “the Judges” and “the System” and “the State” all essentially mean the same thing, and Dredd can talk as if being one limb of Leviathan means there are constraints on his choices (though narratively speaking, at this stage of the strip, there really aren’t). As soon as Dredd leaves the city this tissue of justification is dropped, and his recruitment of Spikes Harvey Rotten is the way he acknowledges it. It’s the moment he becomes the Law, in the way he needs to to survive the poisoned territories ahead of him.    

But what about the threat of the Cursed Earth justifies such extraordinary measures? What is the source of its difference? As the story continues, we come to realise that the Cursed Earth is not just a post-Apocalyptic wasteland, it’s the home of something Mega-City One fears perhaps beyond anything else we’ve seen: the past.

THE HISTORY BOOK ON THE SHELF

Pulp science fiction futures are a mix of extrapolation, discontinuity, and tradition. Judge Dredd is no exception. Dredd’s future has hyper-unemployment, out of control crime and brutal policing – magnified versions of the political bugbears of the late 70s and early 80s. It has a radical break from the present – a new city built on top of the forgotten ruins of old New York. And it has robots and moon colonies because it’s a science fiction strip and those things are what science fiction does.

Even that summary may grant too much to planning. Dredd’s future is also built out of narrative sprawl, the constant pressure of a story deadline meaning new elements were glued onto the setting week-on-week, and what was popular stuck around. We talk nowadays about “world building” and early Dredd has a lot of it, but not in the sense it’s often used today, of a clockwork maker revealing the mechanisms behind a wonderful toy. The worlds of episodic strips aren’t built so much as settled – a strong premise is found; it grows piecemeal, idea by idea; and eventually there’s enough of it that some kind of central planning is required. It’s very possible that Pat Mills, John Wagner or both had strong ideas about the backstory of Dredd’s world before the strip began, but for the first year of the strip there wasn’t a need to develop them. “The Cursed Earth” gave Mills the opportunity.

The question he chose to answer wasn’t necessarily the obvious one. Readers knew Dredd’s own story – one of two clone brothers, raised as a Judge since birth – and a logical next step might have been to answer how the Judges themselves began. Instead, Mills answers a different, hidden question in the strip: how did America end?

Separating these two questions is the great gift Pat Mills gives to future writers in “The Cursed Earth”. It means they don’t have to choose between extrapolation and discontinuity, between a future in which American policing just got harsher and harsher and a future in which some cataclysm wiped out civilization and put the Judges in power. They can have both. There was an Atomic War started by the President. The Judges took power after that. But they already existed. It’s a beautiful bit of thinking by Mills, a creation story that opens up narrative possibilities, not closes them off, and it’s all wrapped up in an extremely strange vampire yarn about broken robots draining people’s blood, in which Dredd makes one of the oddest decisions of his life.

But before we look at the specifics of Robert L Booth, we should pick more at why this revelation about Dredd and his world happens here, in the middle of a rollicking wilderness saga. It’s exactly because the Cursed Earth is the otherworld of Dredd and Mega-City, the hidden reverse where the city’s Law can’t reach, and so it’s the natural home of everything the Judges have placed outside the world defined by their rule. That includes their own history.

Fascist regimes have a particular relationship with history. They exalt an imaginary version of it, while burying the real one. Judge Dredd, a comic about a future fascism built over the literal ruins of our present (or increasingly, our recent past), is in a better position than most to explore this. Sometimes it does that explicitly, but it never needs to – a present-day object or habit seen from a future perspective is a natural story hook for a Dredd done-in-one, and right from the beginning the strip exploits that. But those stories, even the ridiculous ones about addictive comics or rockabilly troglodytes, are also telling another story, of a society whose rulers dread its past, who are constantly on guard against manifestations of history piercing the iron coat they’ve wrapped around the present.

As we learn much later, this watchfulness has become reflexive: the Judges control information as much from habit as from actual goals. Even so, the past is not so easily buried – not when it exists on Mega-City One’s doorstep. The resting place of President Booth is not the only reminder of the past the Cursed Earth turns up. Within a few episodes, Dredd’s party is passing Mount Rushmore, engraved with the face of then-President Carter and with a new carving of a mutant leader. Dredd, inevitably, does not leave the monument unscathed. But it’s still one of the more beneficent encounters he has – mostly in the Cursed Earth, history repeats itself not just as farce but as menace.

The most notorious of Dredd’s brushes with a hostile past are the fill-in episodes by John Wagner and Jack Adrian, which separately ask the same question: what has become of the culture of pre-Apocalypse America? By which they naturally mean, its brands. Neither Wagner’s riff on the McDonalds vs Burger King “Burger Wars” nor Jack Adrian’s story of robot mascots run amok is essential to the “Cursed Earth” storyline as a whole, which is just as well as for a long time they were censored. Remarkably, given the savage glee Wagner takes in showing McDonalds as rapacious, murderous, maniacs – redneck ultra-capitalists determined to turn the whole world into a burger joint – it wasn’t the burger story that got the comic in trouble. Instead, an intervention by the owners of the Jolly Green Giant led to a farcical half-page apology (drawn by Brett Ewins after Bolland refused) and gave the two marketing-gone-mad stories a cachet they probably didn’t deserve.

The legalities of “Burger Wars” and the Jolly Green Giant story are better covered alongside the internal chaos of 2000AD in Summer 1978. Both were rush jobs commissioned to give the overworked Mills a chance to catch up. But their presence in the story also shows the different approaches Wagner and Mills took to the post-Apocalyptic hellscape. Wagner’s “Burger Wars” and his gangster judges in Vegas story are extensions of his existing methods on Dredd – satirising elements of present-day America and putting the unbending narrative force of Dredd up against them. For a good few years Wagner’s Cursed Earth is mostly an opportunity to tell the Wild West Dredd stories he enjoyed on the strip’s jaunt to Luna-City – it’s a back country badland full of hicks and weirdos.

Given the massive opening out of possibilities the Cursed Earth allows, though, it’s interesting that Wagner immediately hits on a vein of potential that he briefly explored in Luna-One, the idea of Dredd as a representative of one system confronting a degraded other. The Cursed Earth introduces the notion of Earth’s other Mega-Cities, but Mills ultimately writes Mega-City Two itself as just a plot-device clone of Mega-City One – the destination was never the point. Wagner’s two stories, on the other hand, both find Dredd confronted with places that claim a legal system of their own, perverse though it is. The deranged brand fanatics of the Burger Wars make sure to tell Dredd they operate a “Burger Law”, and Dredd’s Vegas jaunt ends with him winning a car race for the right to be its chief judge and tear down the system. Neither of these stories are among Wagner’s classics – the Burger episodes are full of commentary from Dredd on what a pointless waste of time it is! – but the idea that the ideal opposition to Dredd is a twisted version of The Law is one Wagner would come back to again and again.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DREDD

Mills’ “Cursed Earth” is less satirical than Wagner’s. It has its share of human evil – the slavers who Dredd liberates Tweak from, for instance. And it has its share of darkly funny moments too, mostly the pitch-black comedy of retribution Mills loves to mete out on authority figures. But the primary mode of Mills’ “Cursed Earth” is horror, not satire. If the Cursed Earth is where Mega City hides its past, horror is the style most suited to it –  the genre which regularly pits the buried past against the unsuspecting present. And while 2000AD was founded in anticipation of a coming SF cinema boom, horror in the 70s was going through explosive shifts of its own. Its creature-feature staples – Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, et al – were being out-frighted by more human depravity, unleashed by demonic or occult forces, psychic abilities, viruses, or simple degeneracy.

The horror cinema boom was even better suited than SF to Mills, Wagner and Finley-Day’s original prescription for reviving British comics: give the kids versions of the stuff they weren’t allowed to see. Of course, horror required more careful handling than thrillers or violent cop shows, and modern horror with its predilection for human-on-human violence would quickly fall foul of IPC’s censors. But Mills was firmly on top of the horror trend – his Moonchild strip for the launch of Misty was heavily inspired by Brian De Palma’s Carrie, for instance. Even if a ‘dead crib’ of The Hills Have Eyes was hardly likely, the vibe of 70s horror could seep into his stories. And so Mills’ Cursed Earth is a gothic landscape that blends ideas and tropes from horror fiction old and new – the town plagued by sky rats is even called Deliverance. It’s full of Old Testament evil, murderous locals, deadly psychic powers, damned towns, undead robot hordes and vampire politicians. And, Mills being Mills, a few Tyrannosaurs too.

It was Nick Landau who encouraged Mills to link the dinosaurs in “The Cursed Earth” to the ones in Flesh, setting up the overarching idea that many of the writer’s stories take place in a shared universe. The bloodline of Old One Eye, nemesis-protagonist of Flesh, is the linking factor between some of 2000AD’s greatest strips. “The Cursed Earth” is where we (and Dredd) meet her offspring Satanus, born as a clone in the 22nd Century before the time-cowboys of Flesh go back to tangle with his Mum. While time travel is always complicated, the dinosaurs of the Old One Eye bloodline are reassuringly similar in every context they show up in: a natural apex predator thrown into conflict with pesky humans.

It’s possible Mills had some regret about killing off Old One Eye at the end of Flesh, as Satanus proves to have very high longevity in 2000AD: like his mother, no mere human can finish him off, even if Judge Dredd gets a rare win. Lesser writers might have focused on Satanus’ backstory – cloned as a theme park attraction, he escapes with bloody consequences – but Mills is more interested in what happens next. In the longest single Cursed Earth segment – an indulgent four parts – The Tyrannosaur is incarnated as a god, fed regular sacrifices by the townsfolk of Repentance, who drug Dredd and Spikes for this dark purpose.

The Satanus story is the delirious peak of Mills’ Dredd-as-horror-comic yarns, steeped in imagery that makes Satanus into a demonic adversary as well as the ultimate example of the past’s grip on the present. He’s initially called simply “the Dark One”; he’s called forth from deep time, his worshippers want to return to the days when the “tyrant lizards” ruled; the climax of the adventure finds him trapped in a church. At heart it’s a more perilous repeat of the flying rats story Mills kicked the saga off with, which you could argue is a sign invention was waning a little. But the gusto with which Mills tackles these episodes – with Mick McMahon showing himself a worthy successor to Ramon Sola in terms of insane Tyrannosaur action – puts the lie to that. Mills returns to the “psychotic David Attenborough” style of narration used on Flesh and Shako, giving third-person voice to Satanus’ bloodlust with a gonzo relish. And it’s a powerful example of Mills’ conception of the Cursed Earth as Dredd’s Otherworld, a zone where the boundaries of sci-fi and horror, of past and present, and finally here the boundaries of the 2000AD strips themselves become weaker. It’s a mythic place, and to survive it Dredd must become something more mythical himself.

As Dredd leaves his city behind, the mythical role Mills chooses for him comes into sharper focus. Early on in his adventure, the character Novar – a mutant gifted psychic powers by the Atomic War – identifies Dredd with the father who abandoned him, a strong and just man. The very next episode, as Spikes tells him not to waste time on villagers who think a vampire is preying on their town, Dredd spells out a credo. He’s duty bound to render aid to anyone in the Cursed Earth who calls on the Law for help. Dredd is like a Western stranger in town, a righteous man: “I am The Law” has gone from a claim of authority to a statement of sheer power to a moral justification for Dredd the Judge to do what Dredd the man knows he should do. And in the next story after that we meet the character who best represents this moral imperative: Tweak.

AIN’T TALKIN BOUT NO ROOTS IN THE LAND

Tweak, a dark-furred alien, is a character who plays a number of bundled, overlapping roles in “The Cursed Earth”. On the surface he’s a way to give Dredd another colourful sidekick as his fellow Judges are killed off, and when he’s called on to rescue Dredd or Spikes it has a dramatic impact an anonymous judge doing the job would not. Visually he’s filling a Walter-shaped space: a little cute, a little comical. As a character he’s not like Walter at all, and he’s an opportunity for Mills to explore what will become a favourite theme of his – the alien who humans entirely misunderstand and mistreat. 

As such he’s also useful to illustrate the difference between Dredd and other men as it’s evolved over the course of the story. When Tweak tells Spikes and Dredd about the gold on his home planet, he understands Spikes is doomed and ends up granting the man his dying wish of being indulged in an impossible fantasy of exploitation, a speedrun of punk outcast to sellout billionaire. Dredd, though, is the one human it’s possible for Tweak to trust. Given Mills’ general approach to authority figures it’s the moment in the story where it’s most unambiguous that this version of Dredd is a heroic one: Dredd has transcended his fellow humans, even to the point of thumping a Mega-City Two judge who mocks the alien.

But this isn’t the end of Tweak’s roles. One key to Tweak is the Brian Bolland cover he appears on, breaking rocks on a Cursed Earth mining gang run by cruel slavers, with the telltale tagline “ALIEN ROOTS”. Alex Haley’s blockbuster Roots miniseries had been a sensation in the US around the time of 2000AD’s launch, with its final episode still the 3rd most watched TV show of all time there. It was rushed to broadcast in the UK in April and May 1977. And it’s fair to say a lot of the iconography and ideas in the Tweak stories – from the slave-catcher gangs hunting runaway aliens, to alien children being spotted by slavers out playing, to Tweak’s doomed escape attempts – are directly inspired by the most famous part of Haley’s work. Tweak is the 2000AD version of the enslaved Kunta Kinte. Kunta’s lifelong refusal to fully renounce his Mandinka heritage becomes Tweak’s determination to never let the humans realise his intelligence and importance.

Mills’ realisation that he could use the metaphor of humans and aliens to talk about race, class and imperialism in a kids’ science fiction comic would catch fire in his 80s work. But in this early incarnation it’s a slightly uneasy fit. While Tweak’s story on the page makes sense, and he has some delightful scenes with the condescending Spikes, it’s also true that doing a Mississippi slave story in Judge Dredd requires Dredd to act as a very direct white saviour figure in a way that feels clumsy given the repeated identification of Tweak’s story with Roots.

What’s also unfortunate, though not Mills’ fault, is the fact that his comic illustration of the coarse stupidity and incuriosity of racism – humans continually assume Tweak is unintelligent because he eats rocks – is being played far less ironically at the same time and in the same comic with Ant Wars’ character of Ant Eater. (Tweak is actually modelled on an ant-eating aardvark, which is such an odd coincidence that if “Cursed Earth” ran six months later I’d have to assume it was meant as a dig). It’s a reminder that 2000AD was not so sure-footed on the topic of race that it could start casually nabbing from stories of the Black American experience and expect to pull it off without issues.

And in the end this is why the Tweak/Roots material lands a little strangely. Roots isn’t just some exciting stories about evil slave-masters and good slaves; it’s a sustained reminder that those slaves are Americans and that the violence of slavery is American heritage. Borrowing from it gets to one of the underlying questions about the “Cursed Earth” story and Dredd as a whole. Roots is a story about American history and an American family, told by and for Americans. But Judge Dredd is absolutely not that. It’s a story set in America, but not one which is about America except inasmuch as US pop culture – its superstars, fashions and game shows – are familiar to British readers and ripe for mickey-taking. The specific social issues of Mega-City-One at the start of the 22nd Century – overcrowded tower blocks and massive unemployment – are 70s British concerns, for instance. 

The Cursed Earth opens up a space in which the strip can confront an exaggerated British idea of America. It’s a story told by and for British people, set in the America of the UK’s imagination, which means it’s a barrage of images and ideas of the USA that a British 10 year old in 1978 might recognise from TV, all tilted and twisted for maximum thrill-power. Cowboys, burgers, Vegas, gangsters, Mount Rushmore, weird Western landscapes, cigar-chomping Generals, atom bombs, with slavery thrown in as part of the mix.

Because most 20th Century pop culture is refracted through the US’s projection of itself, this use of a mediated America isn’t something that affects the readability of Dredd in the way the crasser visits to Asia stick out in MACH 1. (In fact, at least two 2000AD emigres – Alan Moore and Peter Milligan – spent time at the start of their US comics careers on long, twisted tours of the American imaginary: there was a market for a dark outsider view.) The theme park America the Dredd strip creates works well enough, and that’s especially true for the point at which Dredd’s America and the contemporary USA rub up closest: the story of President Booth.

Pat Mills’ idea of a US president who starts a nuclear war and damns the world has remained more useful and relevant than he might have hoped, endlessly adaptable to Presidents since. What’s interesting is that here, at the point of his creation, before Reagan, Bush or Trump, Robert L Booth is “Smooth Booth” (a clear reference to “Tricky Dicky”) before he’s “Bad Bob Booth”. He’s not shown as deranged or devious, and his reasons for starting the Atomic Wars are never explored. The Judges’ takeover is explicitly a coup – in the aftermath of the war Booth is tried for war crimes, sentenced to suspended animation (the state where he’s mistaken as a vampire by local villagers) and at the end of the story there’s a quick “who is the real monster?” conversation with Spikes where Dredd says that anyone who causes the deaths of millions is a true vampire.

In other words, Booth isn’t portrayed as a uniquely bad president at all. All of the later ideas about election-rigging, missile shields, vanity and madness are add-ons which if anything dilute the original point Mills is making, one that’s firmly in line with his lifelong anti-war convictions as expressed in dozens of his other comics. Booth’s crime is what he does, and what he does comes from what he is. Anyone who starts a war – especially a nuclear conflict – is guilty of a war crime. The very concept of a president having that unilateral power is monstrous, and its activation is reason enough for America’s entire political system to be replaced by the Judges (“genetically chosen to be TOUGH – but FAIR”).

Some comics stories, in long-running continuities, become load-bearing, and like “The Death Of Rico” this is one of them. A collection of neat, nasty ironies – the last American president thrown into a story modelled on European folklore; medical robots becoming murderers; and the fate of Booth himself – is a cornerstone of Dredd lore in ways Mills could hardly have foreseen. It meant future writers were gifted the basic conceit of Booth as the catalyst for the Judges’ rise, and were also stuck with the extremely strange details of what happens to him. First, the Judges simply refuse to kill the President, sealing him in suspended animation in the middle of nowhere. Second, Dredd converts his sentence to “life”, working on a farm so he can see how he’s ruined America. It’s an extraordinary choice even within the improvised version of “The Law” Dredd is working in, and later on John Wagner will revisit it as a lapse. But it’s a very Millsian moment – he likes justice best when it’s poetic, which shows why, the creative pyrotechnics of this story aside, his contributions to Dredd since have been minimal.

A STAR IS BORN

The Booth episode is the closest Dredd’s world’s past comes to our present, and Mills uses it to remind us that America as it exists is a terrifying thing. Within the overall story, Booth indirectly leads to Dredd’s final trial, as his robot army who fought the final battle of the Atomic Wars emerge from their burial spots in the Mojave Desert to enact the past’s revenge on the Judges’ present. With Spikes and his fellow Judges dead, and separated from Tweak, Dredd staggers across the desert alone, haunted by all the enemies he’s met on his journey (note that while Ronald McDonald appears here, the Jolly Green Giant does not).

This moment, the story’s climax, is captured in one of the greatest 2000AD covers of all, showing Dredd on his knees, howling his defiance at the Cursed Earth itself. “I AM THE LAW… I AM DREDD… JUDGE DREDD!” It’s by Mick McMahon, one of the two men who’s illustrated the entire 25-part strip. Without McMahon and Brian Bolland, the Cursed Earth would still be a famous and thrilling story, whose contributions to Dredd’s world are well worth talking about. But in 1978, their art, week after week, was what gave the strip its surging, roaring life.

Twenty-five weeks with two artists, with colour pages each week, was an exceptional stint on Dredd. Mills in his memoir gives full credit to Nick Landau for shepherding McMahon and especially Bolland (whose detailed, precisely inked work looks, and was, time-consuming to produce) into delivering it. But the storyline also shows how good the writers and editors were at matching stories to artists – maybe aside from the Vegas section, there’s no part of “The Cursed Earth” where you wish McMahon and Bolland had swapped places. Bolland gets to draw the freaky mutants, the deceptively cute aliens and the weird satirical living brand mascots, all segments where his crisp, realistic style enhances the strangeness he’s being asked to visualise. McMahon’s speciality is the Cursed Earth as a blasted wilderness, full of wild-eyed, wild-haired men, robots and monsters.

Of the two it’s McMahon’s work that dominates, both in page count (he handles around three-quarters of the episodes) and in the iconic images I remember “The Cursed Earth” for. Bolland’s art is, as ever, beautifully smooth, and ironically here he has a facility as a gag cartoonist he didn’t really show on the Walter The Wobot strip. His designs for the Brotherhood of Darkness and the Alien Catcher General are delightfully grotesque, and even better for being as beautifully rendered as the presidential heads on Mount Rushmore. But I feel he’s more at home drawing the people of Mega-City – within a few episodes of Dredd’s return he’s defined the look and tone of the next Dredd story as well as McMahon did this one.

And McMahon, from that first double page spread to the final cover, does an eye-popping, career-defining job on “The Cursed Earth”. The story uses its colour centre-spreads better than anything since Belardinelli’s earliest Dan Dare episodes, delivering a lurid movie poster every week to introduce the story, while on the black and white pages McMahon goes wild. He’s an artist famous for his conscious stylistic changes and redefinitions, and this story – no doubt time pressure played a part here too – finds him at his loosest, with a ragged, energetic line and action-packed compositions. Everything in McMahon’s Cursed Earth is in motion, on the edge, frayed and grizzled looking, pushed to its limits by the hostility of the landscape it happens in. His dinosaurs are worthy inheritors to Ramon Sola’s devil-beasts; his humans have a battered solidity; his faces are often full of fear and desperation. If “The Cursed Earth” succeeds as an action comic or a horror story, it’s McMahon’s art that makes that success.

Behind the scenes, “The Cursed Earth” was ready to end. Its writer and artists were exhausted, the editorial voice that had shaped it was on the move, and 2000AD itself was about to drastically change direction. After a summer in which the comic’s heroes had been dispatched with a brutality IPC bosses reserved for failed titles, that final episode has a triumphant, self-mythologising air. Mills, Landau, McMahon and the rest knew what they’d achieved here. The adventure had been popular enough that an entire Cursed Earth Boardgame had been rustled up and serialised (eating up precious colour story pages) and it wasn’t just nostalgia for his time on the title that made Landau pick it as one of the first Dredd stories to be reprinted in Titan Books’ collected editions.

The Cursed Earth is the best strip 2000AD had yet run. But it’s a turning point for Judge Dredd and the comic itself for reasons well beyond the quality of the story, or the lore it introduced, or even proving that Dredd could work at the half-year-long “mega-epic” length. It’s the series that cemented Dredd’s position as the most popular strip in the comic; more than that, it’s the storyline which proved Dredd could carry the comic on his own if he had to. The strips “The Cursed Earth” ran alongside aren’t all bad, but the gap in quality between even Dan Dare and this is enormous. It didn’t matter. One episode of The Cursed Earth was 9 Earth Pence well spent. Dredd’s crazed shout on Prog 85’s cover isn’t just that of a man about to save Mega City Two. He’s saved his comic too.

HOW TO READ IT: After fresh legal advice determined (correctly as it’s turned out) they could get away with it, Rebellion released The Cursed Earth Uncensored, which collects all 25 parts of the story, and that’s how you should read it. Though if you can only get hold of an earlier edition without the Burger Wars and Green Giant bits, you’re missing the least essential bits of the story.

RECOMMENDED?: Unhesitatingly. As well as establishing a core part of the Dredd universe, it’s early 2000AD at its best – fantastic art and Mills at his most gonzo, going all out for thrills with enough sly jokes and macabre ideas behind them to keep it surprising.

NEXT PROG?: Death Planet! It’s a planetary romance drawn by an Argentine comics legend and it stars 2000AD’s first ever human female lead – what could go wrong?

The route is as follows (and on the map):

3pm: The Dove (Broadway Market)

4pm Saint Monday (Warburton Road)

5pm Pub On The Park (Martello Street)

5:45pm The Heart Of Hackney (Mare St)

6:30pm The Old Ship (Mare St)

7:15pm The Cock (Mare St)

8pm: The Pembury Tavern (Amhurst Rd)

Timings are approximate, but there will usually be some of us in the pubs at the advertised times. Bring your friends, and alcoholic drinks are optional (the pubs like it if you buy something…)

Which Thrill?: Walter is a robot domestic servant of Judge Dredd with an intense devotion to Dredd and a speech impediment. These are his solo adventures.

NOT THE DWOID YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

The first of 2000AD’s experiments with a short half- or one-page comedy strip was Bonjo From Beyond The Stars, a Kevin O’Neill creation that ran on the editorial page at the end of 1977. Bonjo told the story of a rampaging space monster who landed in China and chomped his way through a few dubious stereotypes before being despatched, unmourned, by Tharg himself. It sits on the lists of early stories, an incongruous placing when you actually read it as it’s mostly a way of filling space if there weren’t enough reader letters or adverts.

This sort of strip was a UK comics standard. A three- or four-panel gag story helped when the editorial content ran short and it gave the letters page a little more personality. 2000AD’s combination of a charismatic editor figure in Tharg and genuine reader enthusiasm meant the comic had less of a need for filler like this, and Bonjo is one more footnote from the early days.

But there was nothing about 2000AD’s format or audience that meant a short-format comedy strip couldn’t work. As the comic got older, it became obvious that its readership was getting older with it, but in 1978 the Prog was still very much pitched at 8-12 year olds, and IPC’s hope and expectation was that they’d cross gradually over from comics like Whizzer & Chips and Buster, aimed at kids a little younger than that. Single page joke strips were the bread and butter of that format, something all younger 2000AD readers would be familiar and comfortable with. Why not run one in 2000AD?

At the start of 1978, the editors had their chance. 2000AD had four pages of colour art each week – the cover, the centre pages (at this point occupied by Judge Dredd) and the back cover. The back cover was generally used for full-page pin-ups or any colour advertising IPC had managed to sell. But Kelvin Gosnell’s philosophy as editor was to maximise the strip pages in each Prog – it’s why he started Dan Dare on the cover for a while. It made sense to also run a strip on the back, which would be a one-pager by necessity, as you wouldn’t know in advance whether you needed it in a given prog. 

There was only one real candidate for the star of such a strip, the comedy sidekick of 2000AD’s breakout character. When Walter The Wobot’s solo page launched, he was at the height of his comic powers in the Dredd strip, accompanying the Judge on his mission to Luna-1, and acting as a familiar face (or viewscreen) in a story which lacked any kind of foil or supporting cast beyond anonymous fellow judges. In that first year of Dredd, Walter had become a fixture, apparently as important to the strip as Mega-City One itself. Judge Dredd even seemed to be warming to the little guy.

It was not to be, and Walter’s short-lived solo strip goes some way to explain why. Walter is in possession of two jokes, admittedly more than some comedy sidekicks manage. He has a speech impediment – he’s a Wobot, his employer is Judge Dwedd, and so on. And he is obsequiously loyal to Dredd, to the point of making himself an enormous pest in any main strip story he appears in.

But both these jokes only work in the Dredd strip itself. The speech impediment can be used to undercut dramatic situations and puncture Walter’s (and the strip’s) self-importance – the bandits of Luna-1 are a “wuff bweed”, for instance. And the devotion to Dredd is a way of creating story hooks as well as occasionally providing a punchline to a Walter-centric story. Neither of Walter’s gimmicks suggest much in the way of solo mirth or adventure, and the “Fwiend Of Dwedd” strip bears that out. The main thing it gives us – and it’s certainly a plus – is ten pages of Brian Bolland art we otherwise wouldn’t get to enjoy, especially as he gets to draw more of the freaky, mutated monster-men he would have fun with in the Cursed Earth stories.

It’s telling, though, that both of the longer Walter solo stories – five whole one-page parts apiece – rely on plots that the Dredd strip had already used. Walter is suspected of a crime; Walter is kidnapped. Yes, this time he doesn’t have Dredd to sort things out, and history is repeating itself first as farce and second as even bigger farce, but it does accurately suggest that there are a finite number of Walter The Wobot stories to tell, and that John Wagner had already used the main ones.

The two other main uses of Walter in Judge Dredd itself are for him to do something unusually idiotic or unusually heroic. Both have rich potential – the funniest Walter story is the early Dredd in which the robot has been watching an illegal game show and yells encouragement to the contestants even as Dredd uses him to bust the operation. And, as we’ll see, the fact of his general ineptitude makes him a tempting character to offer help at moments of great drama – an ironic trope John Wagner (and later Alan Grant) particularly enjoy.

So one way to make a weekly one-page Walter strip work might have been to simply tell short, silly Dredd stories with Walter as the main character, like a Wobot-centric version of the eventual Dredd newspaper strip. But they mostly didn’t take this route, perhaps because the writers realised it could ultimately undermine Dredd himself, but also because the ongoing Cursed Earth story was shifting the mode of Judge Dredd, showing that the strip could work with more or less serious characters to bounce the Judge off, even if Spikes Harvey Rotten and Tweak only stick around for a single storyline. It was another way of answering the question Walter demands we ask: does Judge Dredd need a supporting cast?

With hindsight, a strange thing about the Dredd strip is that it takes a few years for them to hit on the obvious answer – Dredd’s natural supporting cast are his colleagues in Justice Department. The first two years of the strip find Dredd paired with a set of grotesques, from Walter and Maria through Spikes and Max Normal and onto Fergee. These are often great characters, and fine foils for Dredd’s inflexibility, but given how central Dredd’s relationships with other Judges become to the strip it gives the early years a slightly hollow feeling, where Dredd is Dredd but the context he operates in doesn’t quite hold together yet.

The lack of companion colleagues also marks Dredd as a departure from the standard template for a Millsian tough guy hero. Bill Savage had Peter Silk; Dredger had Simon Breed; even MACH 1 had the computer in his head, but Dredd is partner-less. It’s a function of the way Dredd inverts the usual set-up. Silk, Breed and the computer exist to demonstrate how the protagonist breaks rules – they’re the establishment voice telling a man like Bill Savage “no, you can’t do that”, so the reader cheers all the more when yes, he can. 

But Dredd is the rules. He has all the ingenuity and ruthlessness of a character like Dredger or One Eyed Jack, but none of their desire to transgress, which makes it hard for that kind of strait-laced foil to work opposite him. So instead the early supporting characters – Walter and Maria, for instance – work to humanise him, creating a funny domestic context as a contrast to the iron justice Dredd spends most of the strip dispensing.

The Cursed Earth makes that harder to sustain: it gives us a Dredd whose will to survive and to complete his mission takes him somewhere beyond human. It’s close to impossible to imagine the man who crawls through Death Valley at the end of that story returning to getting nagged by Maria and having Walter mend his underwear. Ultimately it opens up a much richer lode of characterisation for the strip – how do people react to, and work with, a man like Dredd?

The Judge Dredd strip was quickly outgrowing the original need for a  “comic sidekick” role, but that insight – that Dredd’s stoney face needed a balancing smile – was still a solid one. The role simply broadened, to encompass Mega-City One itself. The city, in all its ungovernable hilarity, became Dredd’s foil; its perps as likely to feed Dredd gags as threaten his life. Walter’s job of humanising Dredd became pointless once Mills, Wagner and others realised that the thing to do with Dredd was to make him even less human but give him a whole world of Walters to contend with.

A BIT OF FUN

One of the great might-have-beens of 2000AD was the attempt by its editors to run a strip by the great Ken Reid, IPC humour title stalwart and the creator of characters like Faceache, a boy who can “scrunge” his features into repulsively contorted shapes. Reid proposed a strip for an older audience, about a man trying repeatedly to kill himself each week but failing. It would have taken his cartooning into even more distorted and disgusting realms but it was apparently nixed by higher-ups: not totally surprising, given the premise. As well as being a few years ahead of where 2000AD actually was, the Reid story reminds me of the final and main reason Walter The Wobot failed to catch on. It just wasn’t good enough.

Single page gag cartooning is a distinctive skill. Its masters, like Reid or Leo Baxendale or the greats of Viz magazine, understand the structure of a page and how to land jokes visually in a way that’s very hard for an artist used to longer strips to adapt to. Brian Bolland’s art for Walter’s strip is lovely, of course, but he was an artist whose best work was usually the visually stunning single image. The splash pages of his Dredd stories, or the later covers he did for Landau’s Eagle Comics US reprints, are magnificent; so are the moments when he uses the six-page canvas to its fullest and pauses the action for a dynamic half-page panel. But none of these make him a great choice for a single-page strip, especially when the scripts give him nothing funny to work with.

So Bolland ends up being both the reason Walter The Wobot is worth glancing at but also, ironically, a big part of why it doesn’t reward much attention. There were ways to do a single-page strip well in 2000AD, but the comic in 1978 didn’t have, and wasn’t really looking for, the kind of artists with the skills to pull it off. Instead 2000AD was moving towards a more dramatic, big-illustration style of page design and finding creators who could run with that. While technically you could call Walter The Wobot a missed opportunity, the failure to make a single-page strip stick doesn’t register against the creative leaps this artist-driven style was enabling, starting with the adventures of Walter’s boss.

The best Walter The Wobot strips are actually the final three, which came out just before the Star Lord merger, months after the Bolland pages had run their course. They’re drawn by Brendan McCarthy, who would, years later, end up drawing 2000AD’s best single-page strip. McCarthy at this point has only hints of his style’s later wildness, but he already has a looser, more chaotic energy than Bolland which lends itself better to a gag page. And the single best Walter story is a pastiche of the perennial American comics ad for Charles Atlas, with Walter getting some fake muscles and becoming “Hewo Of The Beach”. It’s dense, ridiculous, incomprehensible to probably 80% of readers – though US comic literate fans would get it – and plainly a labour of amusement, at least, for McCarthy and writer Gary Rice. 

A couple of weeks later, on merger’s eve, Walter gets the honour of hosting the first appearance of a Star Lord character in 2000AD – Mek Quake, the stupid and sadistic demolition robot from the imminent Ro-Busters strip. (Mek Quake, aside from his regular appearances across Pat Mills’ work, has a habit of simply showing up in other strips if a joke calls for it: he’s too thick to know what continuity he’s in anyway.) Walter’s own experiment as a lead character is then mostly over – he gets a handful of one-off strips over the years, but with Judge Dredd home from the Cursed Earth he can step back, to his and perhaps the reader’s relief, into the background of Dredd’s own strip, albeit a strip that had just changed irrevocably from the buddy comedy of Luna-1.

Where To Find It: I’ve not been able to find any details of Walter’s strip being consistently wepr- I mean, reprinted. Please do let me know if that’s not the case – I don’t think it turned up in either the Dredd Case or Restricted Files, for instance.

Recommended? Not irredeemable but strictly for Bolland (or Walter!) completists.

Next Prog: It’s the big one – 2000AD’s most important story of 1978, as Pat Mills writes Dredd’s longest story to date (with a bit of copyright-busting help from his friends) and throws out almost everything about the strip so far to do it. Are there dinosaurs? Of course there are dinosaurs. It’s THE CURSED EARTH.

Which Thrills? MACH 1 is the final adventures of super-spy John Probe. MACH Zero is the story of a failed prototype, the childlike colossus Zero.

NO MORE HEROES ANYMORE

Dan Dare moved to headline his own comic. Flesh, Harlem Heroes and Invasion all got sequels or reboots in future decades. Dredd is Dredd. Of 2000AD’s original roster, only the Man Activated by Compu-Puncture Hyperpower never got a straight, non-parodic revival. In early 1978, acting editor Nick Landau took the decision to kill off John Probe aka MACH 1, and the decision has stuck. While I’m reaching it after the grand guignol massacre endings of Inferno and Dan Dare, MACH 1’s death came first, and left the most impression. These things can really matter to a kid. I was just the right age, for instance, to be left in absolute shock by the ending of Blake’s 7, everything I imagined I knew about stories and endings dying in a circle of unseen gunfire. Maybe the 8 year olds of 1978 had a similar reaction to “The Final Encounter”. The fact of his ending – and the fact he never came back – is in the end the most striking thing about MACH 1.

That includes the actual story, though. The death of MACH 1 sums up this phase of 2000AD: a decision that’s very bold as a concept – killing off the character that used to be the readers’ favourite – and then on the page feels chaotic and anticlimactic, as the strip veers away from a direction it’s been setting up. MACH 1’s adventures have gradually moved from a story with a very clear and repetitive status quo – John Probe is a violent super-Bond – to one where the motor of the plot is a gradual collapse of that premise. We’ve learned that his boss, Sir Denis Sharpe, is not to be trusted, and that the MACH programme has destroyed the mind of its previous test subject, the hulking MACH Zero. The 1978 stories pick up with a dissipated Probe being hauled back to base after an attempt to quit, where he’s informed that if he fails to go on Sharpe’s missions he will die.

But then – after a strange story in which MACH 1 and a dolphin track down a missing agent (called Robert Peel!) who’s been turned into a merman – Nick Landau raises the stakes even higher. He writes a story where Probe realises that his memories of who he was before the MACH process are missing. When he tracks Sharpe down to solve this mystery he discovers his own replacement, the entirely robotic MACH 2, who almost kills him. “Next Prog: The Final Encounter”, we’re promised, and the reader might be forgiven for knowing what’s coming up. A rematch with MACH 2, the secrets of Sharpe, the MACH project and Probe’s origin revealed, and (if we’ve been reading the increasingly ominous tone correctly) a heroic death.

The death, at least, we get. Pat Mills’ return to his creation opens with John Probe’s funeral, and a heated discussion over whether the man died a hero or a traitor. But the actual story of MACH 1’s final mission is nothing readers might have anticipated. If anything it follows up on Mills’ earlier MACH 1 “UFO” storyline, tying the fates of John Probe and Denis Sharpe into a riff on Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, with Probe sacrificing his life to protect a peace loving alien from the British army and allow him to get home.

The timing of this was as little a coincidence as Dan Dare’s fight with the Starslayer Empire. The final episode of MACH 1 appeared in a Prog with a cover dominated by the single word “UFO”, promising readers’ reports of their own close encounters. “The Final Encounter” had begun a month after Spielberg’s film opened in the UK. MACH 1 was to die as he had lived, a useful framework for cribs of material the readers might be excited about.

The authorities in Close Encounters were secretive but ultimately benign; a perspective highly unlikely to make its way into a Pat Mills story. As with The Visible Man, the powers that be in MACH 1 are mostly concerned with experimenting on the unknown and exploiting it – Fred the alien is the object of Denis Sharpe’s last power grab. Rescuing him gives John Probe – in the final analysis a standard action hero – something to do in the story, and Sharpe is killed off by an accidental shot from one of his own men, taking Probe’s secrets with him. MACH 2 and all that stuff about lost memories? Simply unresolved. The MACH 1 file is closed.

I DID IT M.A.C.H. WAY

In Thrill Power Overload, Nick Landau gives a simple reason for the demise of John Probe: the editorial team hated him and thought the strip was boring. While MACH 1 had actually improved a lot since its launch – the struggle between Probe and his handlers gave the series a much needed throughline and sense of momentum – it’s not too hard for the modern reader to sympathise with Landau here. But it doesn’t explain why Landau himself took pains to set up a final mystery and conflict which the story threw away a few weeks later.

There’s every chance that the hurried conclusion to MACH 1 is simply down to the overall chaos of 2000AD at this point, with IPC’s attention on launching Starlord and Misty, stories shuffling around and Landau trying to get Judge Dredd episodes out of a very overworked Mills. “The Final Encounter” reads like a story that’s doing no more than the job asked of it – there’s none of the crackle and anger of The Visible Man, let alone the fever pitch thrill-power of The Cursed Earth. So it’s very possible Mills simply wasn’t interested in the plot points Landau had set up, or hadn’t taken them on board.

But it’s also possible that the entire “mystery” of John Probe was nothing of the sort. When Probe realises he has no memory or background, that’s as much a commentary on the previous fifty episodes of MACH 1 as a hook for a future story. No writer has ever thought to give John Probe a history or a personality, because he never needed one. He isn’t some kind of mind-wiped tragic figure or a man with buried secrets; he’s a cypher, by far the least personally interesting of any early 2000AD hero. As Sharpe taunts him, perhaps there never was a John Probe. Landau isn’t setting up a final MACH 1 story as much as commenting on the impossibility of making an interesting one. The missions keep coming, until they don’t. What other ending could there be?

The funeral of John Probe is also a symbolic laying to rest of the initial phase of 2000AD, the “sweeney-fi” approach pioneered by Mills of hard-man, anti-authoritarian heroes in the Action style. Brits putting the boot in and getting the job done. Like all successful 2000AD approaches, it left a mark on the comic, became a reference point future writers and editors could riff on when the Prog needed a shot of aggro. And certainly Mills has never tired of writing heroes set on overturning the world they live in. But the nature of those worlds changed, becoming more explicitly futuristic and fantastic as 2000AD began to embrace science fiction less gingerly. In particular the lesson of Dredd’s success – that the spaces your hero moved through could be as fascinating as its characters – helped break the early reliance on contemporary, Earth-set strips in the Prog.

But while MACH 1’s story was over, the next few months saw a spin-off take his place: MACH Zero, starring the brutish MACH program prototype who got all the strength of the Compu-Puncture process but who was left a rage-driven mental wreck. Ironically given his longest story is about MACH Zero battling a flashy American import, Zero comes across as a very blatant crib of Marvel’s Hulk, down to his staccato, third-person speech patterns and child-like naivety. But unlike the Hulk, Zero has no Bruce Banner side to provide human weakness and interest. Zero’s humanity is lost, his one tie with it – the memory of his son Tommy – used only as a way for his enemies to confuse or exploit him.

In fact, both his 1978 stories – “Cousin George” and “The Suit” – feature malevolent characters who trick Zero into believing someone unrelated is a face from his past. Zero hates the man who experimented on him – Denis Sharpe – but doesn’t know that man is dead. He wants to see his son, but neither he or we meet the ‘real’ Tommy. He isn’t even aware that his foe from his first story dies at the end of it. Frank Hart in The Visible Man is an ordinary person forced to become a 2000AD protagonist; Zero is even more adrift, a hero with no aim or agency, an unwanted appendix to a cancelled strip. (Readers did not take to him – the letters page of Prog 73 is pointedly full of Earthlets demanding John Probe back).

ZERO, BUM RUSH THE SHOW

Zero’s finest solo moment in 2000AD is his very first – the cover of Prog 65, an extraordinary piece of work by Ramon Sola, whose art on Flesh and Shako had shown his aptitude for deranged, distorted violence. The elongated, wildly out of proportion form of Zero, bursting out from the cover with a typical “WUUUUUUURGH!”, promises readers a level of spectacular destruction that the strip doesn’t really match. Sola is not able to cut loose on this story as he had on his previous 2000AD encounters, as for all his bulk Zero is a kindly figure, and writer Steve MacManus is more interested in his tragedy than his brutality. 

MACH Zero is our first chance to get a handle on MacManus, one of the most important 2000AD figures, the man behind the green Tharg mask during the Prog’s early 80s golden era. The 2000AD database credits MacManus with all of the MACH Zero stories; the actual comic credits shift script duties to “Geoffrey Miller” halfway through, which may be an alias for MacManus himself or for fellow editorial staffer Roy Preston, or just conceivably a separate human entirely. Pseudonyms were common practice at IPC, where management were on the look-out for.sharp practice in commissioning stories. Whatever the case, the style’s consistent, and it’s indisputable that MacManus created the Zero character.

MacManus’ rather bittersweet memoir of his 2000AD career, The Mighty One, doesn’t spend much time on MACH Zero or on his brief writing career in general. He offers a self-deprecating account of his abilities – not a natural comics writer but good at dialogue – and MACH Zero bears him out. There’s often a snap or flow to how the characters speak, with the vagrant characters written with especial relish. But there’s also a fussy dependence on narration and an unwillingness to trust the artist to tell the story that’s characteristic of an inexperienced comic writer. As MacManus tells it, he was discouraged by the heavy rewriting of his stories – he’d penned the merman one, which to be fair does read as highly confused – and quietly dropped any scripting ambitions. In any case, his rapid promotions during the upheaval of summer 1978 made the point moot.

For all its clumsiness, though, MACH Zero is a much stranger story than John Probe’s relentless beat-em-ups. Where MACH 1 dealt with world-threatening perils, Zero’s main storyline centres on a battle between a celebrity stuntman and an army of vagrants. Zero emerges from the Thames, upstaging “Cousin George”, a celebrity American stuntman and egotist whose vanity makes this intolerable. The Hulk vs Evel Knievel is a great pitch with the makings of a solid two parter; instead the story spools out into curious places, as Zero falls in with a homeless man, Gimpy, and his vagrant friends, and helps them out against some bikers (“You BAD BOYS!” shouts the angry Zero) before being drugged and captured by George.

The rest of the story splits between Zero’s captivity and the vagrants’ activities to help him, and MacManus introduces us to a strange, and seemingly very un-2000AD-like conception. The tramps and vagrants of London are the eyes and ears of a wider underclass society, who take advantage of the ways the normal world barely notices them. They all report to “the Three”, a trinity of hobo kings with the power to enact a “Day Of Whispering” to search London for valuable information, and declare war on those who hurt their own.

This idea, and the vibe of MACH Zero in general, feels like it’s stepped back from science fiction entirely, into the world of gaslit Edwardian London, a city of the pulps and penny dreadfuls. Cousin George may look like Evel Knievel, but he acts more like a pulp villain version of Houdini, and the story nods to a futuristic setting while all its action takes place in sewers, theatres and alleys: the London of Sexton Blake or the Artful Dodger. MacManus plays up to this, giving his vagabonds rich, theatrical manners of speech, and the scenes where they call for the Day Of Whispering and for war are remarkably effective.

It’s almost unlike anything else we’ve seen in 2000AD. But when you look at the stories MACH Zero runs alongside – Chris Lowder’s stories of alien bodysnatchers and cthulhoid colonists in Dan Dare, and Pat Mills’ crashing action heroics into horror in The Cursed Earth – a pattern starts to emerge. This is 2000AD beginning to explore the weird, the pulpy and the fantastic alongside its more typical SF brief, nudging towards a kind of alien gothic where horror and fantasy are inseparable from science fiction. Aside from The Cursed Earth these experiments in weird fiction are never entirely successful, partly because both Zero and Dare are trying to shock a lacklustre strip into renewed life, but they plant a seed for much better, later work.

It’s an indication maybe of MacManus’ wider sensibility. He says in his memoir that he never saw 2000AD as a science fiction comic, rather a comic in which the traditional protagonist types of adventure fiction – the soldier, the cop, the bounty hunter – could be invigorated and explored through a sci-fi setting. We’ll see in future how well he realises these ideas as editor, but MACH Zero is early evidence of a liking for high-concept grotesquerie and a sense of a looser concept for 2000AD, a comic bound together by tone and sensibility rather than genre.

MacManus also stresses the importance for a less sure-footed writer of having great artists to work with. MACH Zero is blessed with two of the most idiosyncratic of 2000AD’s early creators, Ramon Sola and Mike Dorey. While Sola was the perfect artist for Zero’s monstrous rages, Dorey handles the bulk of the “Cousin George” story and is just as ideal for the vagabond sequences. While a lot of the Spanish and Italian 2000AD artists suffered under the indignities of cheap newsprint, their delicate linework crushed by poor reproduction, Dorey thrived on it. He was the Black Sabbath of the early Progs, smothering his compositions in a fog of greys and blacks; smoky, stippled clouds of ink begging to come off on your hands.

Dorey’s murky style suits the grotty underworld of Gimpy, Blind Barrow and their friends, making it look furtive and mysterious. His Zero is more a gentle giant than Sola’s contorted monster, sometimes drawn with an ink-free innocence amidst the rest of the story’s twilit world. The rest of Dorey’s characters are more stereotypical, mostly looking like extras from a Dickens adaptation, including an uncomfortably hook-nosed “Sneaker The Rat”. And as drawing handsome dudes is neither artist’s strong point they can’t get a consistent grip on our villain, Cousin George.

George’s role in the story is as an obvious inversion of Zero – the monster with an innocent heart meets the beloved star full of inner rot and malice. He is, naturally, a coward, never engaging Zero directly (to be fair, he knows he’d be snapped in two) and manipulating and drugging him. His death while trying to flee means MacManus needn’t push Zero into the position of sullying that innocence by killing George; the moral distance remains intact.

But it’s also interesting that MacManus chooses a show-off American to be his bad guy. It puts the spotlight on 2000AD’s attitude to America, a huge and contradictory subject. Inevitably given its most popular strip is set there, 2000AD is fascinated by America – yes, Dredd is more a mirror of British concerns than actual American culture or life, but those concerns also very much included ‘American culture’ as a thing we have to negotiate with in the UK. The comic spent most of 1978 trying to come to terms with the impact – commercial and cultural – of an American film, and the artists it recruited from fandom were steeped in US comics styles and characters.

2000AD’s anti-authoritarian side had an uneasy relationship with American pop culture. The hardman loners it loved to use as templates – like Dirty Harry or The Man With No Name – were often quintessentially American, while the forces opposing them were the class-bound, duplicitious establishment represented by Denis Sharpe. But class was only one way authority could impose itself: there was also cultural power, backed up with the enormous wealth of Hollywood. Cousin George is a good example of a particular stereotype of the ugly American – vain, greedy, and portrayed as hollow and shallow. It’s an idea of American crassness that British creators have often turned to when outmuscled in a US-dominated global marketplace – it’s at the root of the long-running (and bizarre) idea that Americans don’t “get irony”. 

George’s wealth, resources and hollow vanity are overturned by the dregs of British society – abandoned by some unspecified technological change (MACH Zero seems to take place in a more explicit near future than MACH 1 did) but able to use their wits and fellowship to take this interloper down a peg. It’s a miniature of how 2000AD came to present itself during the MacManus years – a gang of scruffy, anarchic Brits taking risks and getting away with things that other comics, particularly US imports, could not. Behind the scenes, though, the issues facing 2000AD and mainstream US creators were very similar – creative rights, art ownership and an environment biased towards not giving credit, respect or fair reward to people working on comics. This created tensions MacManus’ tenure would eventually see explode.  

MACH Zero’s next outing was more subdued – Roy Preston’s “The Suit”, a revenge of the nerds story about a mild-mannered accountant who is sealed into an exoskeleton and goes mad with power, barely features Zero and has none of the strangeness of “Cousin George”. It ends, rather sadly, with Zero back at square one, a prisoner of the authorities again. Like his predecessor/successor John Probe, he’d return for a final bow, but this was the whimpery end of the MACH programme’s run in the Prog. As those letters begging for Probe’s return showed, the strips had done their job, establishing 2000AD as a comic with an unsentimental edge, willing to kill off its stars when their stories no longer sparked thrills.

How To Read It: Both the final MACH 1 stories and the complete run of MACH Zero show up in Close Encounters, the second MACH 1 collection from Rebellion.

Recommended? MACH Zero is a strange and mostly forgotten story, presented in a way that’s unusual for early 2000AD. It’s not completely successful but it’s worth reading. The final stories of MACH 1 aren’t terrible but are of mostly historical interest.

Next Prog: We’re back to Mega-City One at last for Judge Dr- ah no, wait, for the first ever Judge Dredd spin-off strip, starring beloved sidekick Walter The Wobot! Does 2000AD need comedy strips? Does Dredd need a supporting cast? We’ll be answering these questions and more!

Which Thrill? A hard-bitten Naval Commander battles an alien invasion, almost single-handedly. If that doesn’t narrow it down, it’s the strip’s fault not mine.

Among the scattering of short-run 2000AD stories in the first half of 1978, Colony Earth! feels especially runty. Unlike Death Planet or Ant Wars, it never gets a cover. Unlike The Visible Man, it’s not by one of the big 2000AD writers and was never considered as a launch strip. A 10-part story about a planned invasion by the alien “gnomes”, it’s remembered as a space-filling failure, in the unlikely event it’s remembered at all.

It would be nice to be able to revise the critics’ verdict on Colony Earth and put a bit of shine on a hidden gem, but unfortunately the story deserves its poor rep. The general vibe is one of a middleweight boys’ paper story trying hard to fit the 2000AD style and failing, like a nice kid who suddenly decides he needs to swear. Why is a Commander in the British Navy suddenly talking like Bill Savage? Because, I’d guess, someone – whether writer/artist Jim Watson or one of the editorial staff – is trying to punch up a flat script.

You can see this from the very first page, with a fishing trawler hauling in the nets on the North Sea. “But you’ve pulled out MORE than cod, fisherman!” screams the caption, in what could be a parody of the breathless narration of Invasion! or MACH 1. The scene as illustrated is one dozens of movies and TV episodes might have gone with as an introduction, the equivalent of the modern ‘cold open’ with an ominous, mysterious vignette before we cut to our main cast. But the 2000AD style demands more immediate thrills, even if the script is begging for something slower paced.

What’s telling about this that, just one year in, there is a 2000AD style, and quite a rigid one. The 2000AD editors know what they want Colony Earth to feel like – a story that grabs you by the neck from page one and doesn’t let go. Everything we’ve seen in the comic before has worked on that principle, after all. But Colony Earth is the first example of a story which is actually worse for trying to follow that lead. It’s not just the narration. The central characters – Naval Intelligence Captain Hunter and peacenik Professor Vandenburg – feel like a pastiche of the familiar Action combo of the hard-as-nails hero and his ineffective by-the-book sidekick, with the twist that both act like idiots.

This is a shame, because the most interesting thing Colony Earth does – and it’s a trick later short-run stories would sometimes use more successfully – is constantly raise the stakes over its first few episodes. A mystery on board a fishing trawler becomes a hunt for a missing nuclear sub. The hunt for the sub becomes an investigation of an ancient alien site. The investigation of the site turns into an attempt by aliens to geo-engineer earth back to the ice age. The shift in perspective is dizzying, or at least it should be, but by trying for all out thrill-power from panel one any sense of a building mystery is lost. 

That might not be a problem if the drive to make Colony Earth more exciting worked. But squeezing the story into a 2000AD style isn’t the worst of its issues. Watson also has too much going on in his own plot, falling back on exposition and heavy use of narrative captions, so it often feels like you’re reading an outline of a story, not the story itself. His pacing is unwieldy – episode one ends with the revelation that a dredged up vessel “isn’t designed for water – it’s designed for SPACE”. Good cliffhanger! But the episode actually ends with the hero saying no, it can’t be that, deflating any momentum the reveal creates. Watson is also an artist whose strengths are individual action and facial expression – he can set a scene effectively but there’s not a strong sense of place even when the locations are as thrillingly exotic as anything we saw in MACH 1.

In the second half of Colony Earth the relentless expansion of scope dies down, and the story focuses on an attack on the aliens’ mothership, which is draining Earth’s seas and expanding its poles from orbit. In classic 2000AD style, Hunter takes this job on himself after finding Cape Canaveral destroyed: he grabs the first guy he can find wandering around in an astronaut’s gear and gets him to pilot the captured alien craft, taking his academic chum along for the ride too. Despite the astronaut getting captured, and the Professor wasting time on such un-thrill-powered activities as negotiation and compromise, Hunter’s two-fisted pluck is more than a match for the extremely poorly prepared aliens. (In fairness, they have arrived back in the solar system expecting to find Ice Age tribes). Hunter destroys the mothership, noting after this potential genocide that he hopes the next aliens humanity meets are friendly.

Colony Earth is a two-fisted alien invasion yarn that might have run as a scientific romance in the 1910s, except it’s gussied up to 2000AD standards with a short-tempered action hero. Watson hustles the story from point to point with a minimum of sense and a maximum of contrivance – Earth is saved ultimately because the invading “gnomes” have one killer robot which they operate by a hand-held remote control. When the alien operator gets socked in the jaw and drops it, the tide dramatically turns.

But so what if the story is held together by string and silly putty, you might say? Very little in the early years of 2000AD can stand up to the full glare of plot hole examination. The thrill’s the thing. And yet the failure of Colony Earth lets us come up with a working hypothesis on when “not making sense” matters or doesn’t. The twist that the killer robot can’t handle stairs makes no sense – the aliens who built the ancient temple (with stairs) also built the robot. But the reason that matters is because it makes the robot seem significantly less cool and dangerous. A plot hole is forgivable if it increases thrill-power: the fumblings of Colony Earth drain it from the strip.

Bar a few Kevin O’Neill strips, Colony Earth the first time in 2000AD we’ve seen a writer/artist take on a story, and it’s bizarre that it’s the most stilted and awkwardly told of anything we’ve yet read. Watson undercuts his story in the telling of it, losing momentum every time he wraps up a scene with a laborious transition, or softens the tension of a cliffhanger by giving Hunter the last word. His art can be effective – the storm-lashed trawler makes an atmospheric and effective opening, and there’s a shadowy urgency to most of the action which works well. But Jim Watson is constantly being undermined by Jim Watson and his perfunctory pacing and thudding dialogue.

In the wider scheme of 2000AD, Colony Earth is the comic attempting a kind of science fiction it hadn’t really tried yet – a 50s B-Movie catastrophe story along the lines of The Day The Earth Stood Still (“Charley”, the mute robot in Colony Earth, is a fairly obvious analogue for that film’s Gort, another lone, powerful weapon turned on our planet by alien forces). If you come to it with that hokey, drive-thru, vibe in mind the story works, not well, but perhaps a little better. It also explains why readers found it old fashioned, of course, with persistent later suspicions that the strip had been created for and mothballed by some earlier comic and dug out of storage when Gosnell felt the content pinch.

That particular criticism feels unfair – if Colony Earth is old-fashioned, it’s because it’s a more traditional kind of SF story. Jim Watson, after all, was an established artist but not outdated – he was getting work for other IPC titles well into the 80s, with stories for Scream! and Battle. His only previous science fiction credits, though, hailed from an earlier era, with some lovely work for 60s weekly TV21, very much in what looks like a post-Eagle space adventure style. So it’s not too surprising that his story for an SF adventure comic looks a little rusty.

Doing a 50s B-Movie story is a solid move for 2000AD at this point too – as we talked about with Dan Dare, it’s a science fiction comic which is still finding out which of the many modes of SF work well for it. Every 2000AD story in 1978 is answering that question in a different way, even if a lot of those answers turn out not to be good. The problem Colony Earth has isn’t that it’s a B-Movie sci-fi epic on a 10-week timetable. The problem is that it doesn’t do a great job of being a B-Movie, because most B-Movies were about something.

The classic B-Movies of the 1950s and 1960s became classics not just because they were thrilling and original but because their themes touched the concerns of the time – the Cold War, the bomb, the fear of subversion or authoritarian takeover. 2000AD’s early line-up of stories followed suit: even the grand guignol absurdity of Shako is also a parable of the way international politics and industry intrudes on the natural world (and in that story pays the bloody price). Colony Earth has the iconography of the drive-in sci-fi feature – robots, spacemen and aliens, and even a couple of newer tropes like the “ancient astronauts” of Erich Von Daniken (A book by Richard Mooney, Colony Earth, was published in 1974: “STARTS WHERE DANIKEN LEFT OFF”, cries the cover). And if you want to really stretch things it has a title that hints at questions of “who decides ownership of a place?” which might have some kind of real world resonance. 

Maybe they would in someone else’s story. But Colony Earth isn’t arranging any of these pieces into a meaningful pattern. Not only is there nothing thematically interesting in the threat of the “gnomes”, the story actively rejects the idea of co-operation or dialogue. Sometimes the alien scum are just alien scum who need to get shot in the back, apparently.

It’s worth saying that this conception of the evil enemy who can be safely slaughtered is something 2000AD is happy to embrace for several years to come. But when the idea shows up across the prog’s first decade or so, usually in future war stories with the Sovs and the Norts and the Krool, it’s because 2000AD has usually preferred to monsterise the goodies rather than humanise the baddies, to put a far more cynical spotlight onto the side our heroes are on. The two-dimensional storytelling of Colony Earth only approaches that complexity by accident, as the gnomes are so feeble an enemy that I feel a bit sorry for them.  

Colony Earth is a dead end for 2000AD, but like most of 1978’s dead ends it was worth exploring, if only as a proof of concept for what 2000AD shouldn’t be doing. The truth is that while Colony Earth wouldn’t have been a highlight of any comic, it might have passed muster in Tiger or Valiant or one of 2000AD’s other rivals. It stands out as awful in this context because 2000AD had already hit an unusual level of consistency and quality. This was something to be proud of for the editorial team, but also a curse: Colony Earth proved that you couldn’t simply port in other writers and expect a 2000AD-standard strip out of them. The pressure on the scripters who could hit the standard was only becoming more intense.

HOW TO READ IT: Like The Visible Man, it’s reprinted in the grab-bag collection SCI FI THRILLERS.

RECOMMENDED?: No, though it’s not a difficult or painful read. It’s just very mediocre.

NEXT PROG: Once he was 2000AD’s most popular strip, but how the mighty fall. We return to the super-spy world of MACH 1 to look at John Probe’s final missions, and also talk about his successor, the extremely strange British Hulk story MACH Zero.

Which Thrill? A daredevil gets into a car accident and ends up with transparent skin. Hijinks ensue.

GOT A HEADFUL OF IDEAS AND IT’S DRIVING ME INSANE

As the ‘first five’ strips ran their course, Kelvin Gosnell and Nick Landau replaced them with a series of short-run stories, some holdovers from 2000AD’s development phase, others new  commissions from IPC Youth Group regulars. When histories of 2000AD are written they tend to lump these late 70s stories – Colony Earth, Death Planet, Angel and Project: Overkill – together as early failures. Not long enough or, frankly, popular enough to be collected individually, the stories have only been reprinted as part of grab-bag collections. The Visible Man is often counted as part of this wave of brief, disliked stories, and on length criteria it certainly fits. Pat Mills’ and Trigo’s story of a man with transparent skin runs to only six parts – barely the length of a single American comic book. 

In some ways the short thrills do look forward in 2000AD history – one-off short series become a regular part of Tharg’s mix; some are genuine highlights, and it’s interesting seeing creators figure out what works for the Prog in this format. But they also prove how unusual the comic’s opening salvo was. Pat Mills developed the initial stories (and Judge Dredd) as “all No 1s”; features so inherently strong, and with such potential for continued storytelling, that there would be no need to rush any to a conclusion or find quick replacements.

It was another reaction against the standard adventure comic formula, which ran to 8 or 9 strips. Some of these would inevitably be weaker, leading to a set-up of a few perennial stars supported by short-run strips in a continuous churn. At this point in Battle, three years old by now and firmly established, pilot Johnny Red and veteran taskmaster The Sarge were bringing readers in every week. That left room for strips like Mills’ Samurai as brief two- or three-month experiments. But with 2000AD having only 5 or 6 strips, it should be possible to keep the quality higher, leading to a more stable, more popular and better comic.

Mills’ bet looked to have paid off, with all but one of 2000AD’s starting line-up lasting six months, and that one (Flesh) replaced the issue after it ended by the surface-similar Shako. (For comparison, three of Action’s opening stories were gone by the 12th weekly issue.) For Gosnell’s part, he wanted to take the idea even further, and started to develop Star Lord as a monthly title with only two strips which could be developed to an unprecedented level of quality.

But meanwhile the 2000AD experiment had a flipside. If stories did end, there was little wiggle room in commissioning new ones. Get too many wrong and you’d be back in the standard pattern, with one or two reliable features carrying the Prog through a churn of shorter stories. And as the parade of semi-forgotten Thrills suggests, that’s basically what happened: as 1978 wore on, 2000AD began to revert to the IPC mean.

The Visible Man fits into that parade, but as a Pat Mills solo script it also harks back to 2000AD’s origins. It showed up in the dummy issue of AD 2000 that Mills presented to IPC near the end of 1976, and at that point it wasn’t much more than a gross, awesome Trigo visual, a human whose skin was entirely translucent, meaning the world could see his every organ working, like a living example of the plasticised corpses in Body Worlds exhibitions. “It’s horrible!” the man screams, just to rub it in.

This walking anatomy lesson made for a sick, memorable image but Mills decided it was wrong for the launch of 2000AD. That was a good decision. Frank Hart getting his organs out would have jacked up the gross value of Prog 1 – certainly a positive for the audience. But where would the strip go from there, with Frank on the run from the scientists who want to use him as a medical guinea pig? In the story as it saw print, The Visible Man is ultimately a reactive character. He is constantly chased and abused by others, and his efforts to help his own situation come to nothing until the very end. He has an unusually low level of agency for a 2000AD protagonist.

More to the point, he has a very low level of agency for a Pat Mills protagonist, which in the early days of 2000AD amounted to roughly the same thing. Frank Hart, from what little we see of him before he meets the radioactive sludge that gives him see-through skin, is not a natural anti-authoritarian. He’s a successful guy, a playboy even, a thrill-seeker who likes fast cars and beautiful women. Standard operating procedure in a Mills strip is to show us a tough guy who a corrupt system can’t understand or contain: Frank, on the other hand, is a privileged man who gets everything taken away from him. He has anti-authoritarianism thrust upon him, as he realises he can’t trust the doctors and scientists hoping to “help” him. But as a walking horror he has even less ability to do anything about it than an average dude, let alone a badass narrative enforcer like Bill Savage. The Visible Man isn’t just a visual, body-horror story. Within the terms set by the rest of 2000AD it’s a psychological horror too – an lesson in what Authority will do to you when it decides you’re its object.

This is another reason the strip was not a good fit with the launch – Prog 1 was a consistent package, a set of stories which outlined the base case for a 2000AD hero; The Visible Man sits outside that. But he doesn’t sit outside the broader spectrum of the stories Pat Mills had been writing for IPC.

IT’S A SHAME THE WAY SHE MAKES ME SCRUB THE FLOOR

When talking about the IPC ‘comic revolution’ of the 1970s, Mills doesn’t date it to his development of Battle with John Wagner in 1974. Instead he sees the real starting point as three years earlier, with Gerry Finley-Day helming the launch of new girls’ title Tammy. The IPC girls’ titles were strong sellers which benefitted hugely from IPC’s close ties with Spanish and Italian studios. European artists provided an expressive subtlety, particularly when it came to faces and body language – a perfect skill for stories based more on melodrama than physical action.

With Tammy, this wave of artistry got the stories it deserved. Plenty of previous girls’ comic stories had mixed elements of misfortune, tragedy and fear into their tales of school drama, girls’ hobbies, and mystical intrigue. But the sheer concentration of hard-luck stories, trauma and tragedy that Finley-Day included in Tammy is by all accounts something new. Of the 9 strips in its opening line-up only one – the comic misadventures of Courier Carol – offered laughter mixed in with the relentless dread and injustice. It wasn’t until the comic absorbed stablemate Sally after 3 months of unrelenting gloom that more light-hearted strips could be grafted in. 

And – at least according to the partisan Mills – Tammy pushed those dark elements harder and further than competitors, mixing them with a degree of social realism and more prominent working-class characters. The longest-running story of Tammy’s opening line-up, No Tears For Molly (later Molly Mills) is one example. Molly is an East End girl forced to work as a servant to support her widowed mother, and each minor triumph – sending a postal order to Mum; helping a horse destined for the knackers’ yard – is balanced by new danger; her evil butler boss beats her, the idle stable boy blames her for a fire. Writer Maureen Spurgeon provided concentrated drama and constant reversals of fortune, a recipe repeated in three page instalments across every other story in the comic.

No Tears For Molly is an example of the “cinderella story”, one of Tammy’s most successful subgenres – Molly’s arduous path was trodden many times over by fellow orphans and servant girls. But Tammy’s most notorious early story was Finley-Day’s Slaves Of War Orphan Farm, from another subgenre Tammy made its own. It was the defining example of the hair-raisingly named “group slave story”, where the heroine is one of a bunch of kids forced into dreadful servitude. She fights back, meaning she bears the brunt of whatever terrible cruelties the writer can conjure up. (In the case of War Orphan Farm, Finley-Day added extra shock value by naming the chief tormentor Ma Thatcher, after the Tories’ new Education Secretary).

A third style Tammy successfully exploited was a weird mystery subgenre: strips that built themselves around baffling goings-on, leaving readers on the hook as to what on earth the explanation could be. All these were formats that played on their readers’ appetites for tragedy and suspense but also credited them with sophistication and patience to see a story through to its conclusion.

Tammy’s remorseless melodrama was an enormous, continued success – in a sector prone to mergers between titles it lasted an impressive 13 years before vanishing in an act of management revenge after the 1984 NUJ strike. Mills’ experience as a freelance sub-editor with Finley-Day and Tammy was an admitted inspiration for his later work injecting greater grit and realism into war, adventure and sci-fi titles. But the specific winning formulae of the girls’ comics didn’t travel so well. In a fascinating interview with girls’ comic historian Jenni Scott, Mills talked about failed attempts to run slave and mystery stories in the boys’ titles – strips like Battle’s Terror Beyond The Bamboo Curtain, a weird mystery story set in a Japanese POW camp, which opened strongly but bored and confused readers looking for the more direct approaches in the rest of Battle. Like a group of adolescent D&D players who ignore the plot and want to fight everything they see, readers wondered why the heroes didn’t simply brush aside the bamboo curtain and kick some arse.

Mills doesn’t mention The Visible Man in his interview with Scott, but it feels very much in this lineage, an attempt to do the kind of traumatic the-world-against-me melodrama you might see in a girls’ title but combine it with visceral body horror in a way 2000AD readers would respect more. Unusually for a 2000AD story The Visible Man focuses heavily on Frank’s emotional state, not just on what he’s doing – it lingers on his fear, his desperation, his anger as people he hoped he could trust react to him with sheer horror. The result is the most intense and odd story 2000AD had run at this point.

Like a lot of successful childrens’ writers, Mills and Finley-Day understood the cruel streak kids often enjoy in their fiction, a desire to see awful things happen within the safety of a story and an understanding of genre. At the base of this was their belief that kids have a sophisticated conception of genre and its expectations. The shocking violence of 2000AD heroes is legitimate given their monstrous or robotic opposition; the grotesque suffering of Tammy heroines is mitigated by the understanding that eventually – in some far off story – it will end happily.

Even so, the creators of 2000AD wanted to push against some of those remaining assumptions. Wartime and futuristic settings offered more opportunity to tell stories that could end unhappily or ambiguously. John Wagner had led the way here, with the 1976 strip Darkie’s Mob in Battle, about a group of defeated British soldiers in Burma who find themselves under the command of the psychopathic Captain Joe Darkie. The casualty rate is high across the strip’s year-long run, with the framing device of a bloodied journal making it clear that nobody is leaving the ‘Mob’ alive. The series was widely criticised and, of course, enormously popular.

Lessons were learned by 2000AD’s writers – whether they were the right lessons is another question – and 1978 sees a hecatomb of characters. We’ve already seen how Inferno and Dan Dare ended with their cast being slaughtered, and we’ll see other supporting characters and heroes killed off across these entries. After a brief run full of struggle, betrayal and trauma, the Visible Man survives – even triumphs, after a fashion – but it’s hardly a traditional victory. He ends the strip alone in an experimental space probe, joyfully free at last of the forces looking to use and abuse him, happy to pay the cost of complete isolation from the human race. What brought him to this point?

EVERYBODY WANTS ME TO BE JUST LIKE THEM

For a short story, the Visible Man is a complex and furious one. The anger starts with the title, on one level just a nice riff on H G Wells. But anything plus “Man” carries a different weight by the 1970s, after decades of Superman and Spider-Man and years of the Bionic Man and the Six Million Dollar Man. The Visible Man is, as well as everything else, a chance for Mills to take aim at one of his great lasting hatreds: superheroes.

Mills has written for mainstream Marvel – he created a futuristic version of the vigilante Punisher for them – but his main engagement with superheroes is the 1987 creator-owned series with Kevin O’Neill, Marshal Law, for Marvel’s Epic imprint. This joyfully depicts the cape and cowl crowd as sadists, perverts, CIA flunkies, drug addicts, criminals, and general scumbags for “hero hunter” Marshal Law to wipe out. The idea of superheroes as flawed or outright fucked-up was not an uncommon theme in the late 80s, during the wave of comics interrogating and exploiting the idea of “adult” superheroes. 

But Mills had a particular advantage: he really fucking hated superhero comics. He was early to the idea that they were glib, crypto-fascist power fantasies whose bright colours and vigilante solutions were a smokescreen for the operations of real power (especially American power: Marshal Law’s origin is as a super-soldier for clandestine wars in Central America). On Marshal Law this hatred manifests as an orgy of riotous vengeance with O’Neill’s angular, BDSM-inspired character designs merging sex, death and violence into an entertaining, exhausting screed.

Obviously the Visible Man doesn’t touch on that kind of extremity. But I still read the strip as a sideways critique of the idea of the American superhero. Its title and opening scene could be a superhero origin – an ordinary guy turned extraordinary by an accidental encounter with an experimental chemical. When Frank Hart awakens in a darkened room he immediately realises something’s wrong, and the revelation of exactly what is the definitive visual moment in the strip, artist Trigo relishing the chance to be as grimly detailed as he can. Frank has been given a unique ability, just like a superhero, but Mills is brutally honest about what that might entail – immediate incarceration and experiment in a world of “norms” who entirely reject the “freak” who walks among them.

Frank breaks free, but every episode after that sees him sink lower, as his attempts to evade his fate collapse and he’s driven gradually mad. Mills’ narration switches more and more to a pointed, taunting second-person as his protagonist crumbles, sleeping rough and escaping his nightmare new life only in dreams. This, for Mills, is the likelier fate of someone suddenly singled out from the norm – not heroism, but utter isolation.

By the time Frank Hart lies dreaming in an alleyway The Visible Man has become overtly a horror comic, written with a streak of cruel black humour: Frank attempts to tan himself only to almost burn his internal organs; he uses make-up to try and appear normal but of course it melts off his face. The tight story length means Mills has no incentive to string anything out – the ghastly incidents follow one upon another with a relentless cruelty even Tammy readers might have blanched at.

Eventually Frank gives in and returns to the lab – a second artist, Montero, has taken over the strip and gives us a remarkable image of dozens of cops converging on the phone box (that superheroic site!) where Frank is calling the doctor to make a deal. By now story is explicitly contrasting “freak” Frank with the ordinary lives of the “norms” – he crashes a wedding and guzzles cake while the guests scream. Frank is both rupture and resource – the lab is determined to send him into space to directly observe the effects of G-Force on the body.

Before he goes, there’s one final, subtle horror – it’s revealed that the doctor has an antidote for Frank, a chemical that can make his skin opaque again and end his suffering. The last straw for the Visible Man comes as he realises the scientists will simply never use it – they will always have some new pet project they need him for. His suffering is a choice, and as he realises that he makes his own choice, setting the controls of the space probe to drift away from Earth. (The strip makes a point of saying he has enough food pills for a lifetime, to blunt the otherwise clear implication that a lead 2000AD character is committing suicide.)  

At the end of the story the body horror and the systemic horror of The Visible Man have merged. The skin, the strip says, is what makes us human; strip it away and our status as objects in thrall to power is exposed. Plenty of readers have seen the story as an attack on animal experimentation, and that’s certainly an element – the plans the doctors have to test and observe Frank usually involve the kind of treatments meted out on lab animals, like induction of diseases. But like Flesh, The Visible Man is a grab-bag of furious metaphors, this time centred around dehumanisation – animal rights, the treatment of disabled people, abuse of state power and even surveillance culture, with the space probe Frank ends up in wired with a camera trained on each individual organ. 

The Visible Man is about the terror of becoming visible, not just in the story’s literal, disgusting sense but in the sense of suddenly being noticed by the system you’ve blithely spent your life in. To be visible – a person of interest in the eyes of Authority – is horrifying and inescapable. This is why Frank Hart is a rarity in a Mills strip – a successful, handsome, middle-class guy. His privilege means he’s entirely unprepared for the shock of visibility, and it destroys him.

This makes him a very different proposition from the “hyper heroes” 2000AD advertised at first. In terms of style, The Visible Man fits squarely into the breathless, brutal mode of 1977 2000AD, but its format and content marks it out: it’s tight, nasty and focused in a way that the launch strips, designed to create enduring set-ups and episodic templates, couldn’t be. Mills is showing other writers what a short-run 2000AD story could achieve, an example nobody followed as well for years.

Frank Hart’s suicidal anti-hero is also emblematic of the darkening of 2000AD over the course of 1978, that feeling of a group of young creators continuing to push hard (recklessly hard, in some cases) against the traces of conventional heroism in the early Progs. Bill Savage got a happy ending, but the Harlem Heroes and MACH 1 were not long for this world, and Dare was pistol-whipping his men and facing mutiny. A lot of the bumpiness of this phase of 2000AD comes from a sense that the Prog was trying to find a goldilocks level of cynicism – high enough to give creators freedom and still be a vivid, shocking alternative to any other comic, but not so high that it was impossible to run viable, ongoing strips with characters readers actually liked. The Visible Man is a remarkable strip, angry to the point of nihilism – the most “punk” 2000AD ever got, you might say. But like Frank Hart himself, it’s a freak, and 2000AD would need to define its own kind of norms.

HOW TO READ IT: More than a dozen of 2000AD’s short-run strips, mostly from its first decade, are included in Rebellion’s SCI FI THRILLERS collection. The Visible Man is one of them.

RECOMMENDED?: Yes. It’s one of the best early 2000AD shorts; intense, melodramatic and not really like anything else from the 70s Progs.

NEXT PROG: Ancient aliens, giant robots and a new ice age – the stakes are high in 2000AD’s first ever writer/artist strip, Colony Earth, but is the quality? (Spoiler: No.)

Which Thrill? Dan Dare boldly goes where no pilot of the future has gone before, exploring the “Lost Worlds” with a crew of ne’er-do-wells.

A NEW TROPE

Dan Dare opened his second year in the middle of an epic – the longest continuous story, excepting Flesh, that 2000AD had run. Writer Gerry Finley-Day had spent a couple of months establishing a supporting cast of motley spacers for Dare, and now dropped them into the middle of what one might call a Star War, leading a rebellion against an evil Empire. Nobody would have imagined this was a coincidence.

Dare’s position in the comic was always one of symbolism and pragmatism. He was certainly a passion project for artist Dave Gibbons, a boyhood fan of the Eagle, but mostly Dan had been the hook the nascent comic needed to get press coverage (and perhaps loosen a few Dads’ wallets). He was also the most traditional sci-fi story in 2000AD. The idea of a coming wave of interest in sci-fi had been a key argument in getting IPC to launch the comic in the first place. Now, with the UK release of Star Wars in December 1977, the wave was about to break. Dan Dare stood ready.

The gap between the US and UK releases of Star Wars created an opportunity. Many of the 2000AD staff had seen previews over the summer of 1977, certainly including sub editor Nick Landau, who made regular transatlantic trips to SF and comics conventions in his other job as a distributor. Promo photos from the film were everywhere (including a very grimy looking “photo review” in 2000AD itself). Word of mouth was strong and getting stronger. Cinema audiences thrilled to the Star Wars trailer, and the hardest core of fans might even have got hold of imported copies of the Marvel Comics adaptation. 

So the Dare “Star Slayers” story exists in a weird limbo where it’s doing a crib of something most readers would know about but none of them would have seen. It’s a story that’s obviously “post-Star-Wars” in the sense that it wouldn’t exist without it, but it’s technically pre-Star-Wars in that it was about halfway through its run when the film’s wide UK release finally happened. By that point the most obviously derivative elements in the strip were fully established – “laser swords”, space battles and dogfights between ships; a colossal, round, killer satellite (with a separate superweapon called “Star” for good measure) and the helmeted “Dark Lord” ruling the Starslayer Empire from the planet Starslay and its dozen “slave worlds”.

Dan Dare has the honour of being one of the very first non-Star-Wars media to try and do Star Wars, and as such also has the honour of being one of the very first to get lots of important things wrong. The Star Slayers saga is the worst Dare story of its first couple of years, and the reasons illuminate why Star Wars was such a challenge for 2000AD to deal with.

For a start, Star Wars has a badly misleading title. Only in its closing act is it any kind of war story, with a heroic rookie pilot making a life or death raid to cripple the enemy’s war machine. Finley-Day’s Dare strips, though, are full of pitched battles. The basic structure of “Star Slayers” finds Dare moving from slave world to slave world, finding a demoralised population and inspiring them to heroic rebellion by some good old Dan Dare grit. It’s repetitive, and if you could bring yourself to take it seriously it might even be uncomfortable: does every alien race long for a gutsy human leader?

There is no Dan Dare equivalent in Star Wars, or anything near. The movie is the story of a farmboy becoming a hero and discovering his unique gift (with no freight of dynastic background at this stage), and as he discovers his place in the universe the viewers get to discover the wonders of that universe with him. Star Wars is a series of remarkable tonal shifts and visual reveals, each of them making the world wider and wilder for Luke and for us.

This isn’t just something Dan Dare couldn’t imitate. It’s something 2000AD itself was specifically created to be the opposite of. There is exactly one wide-eyed young rookie in the launch strips of 2000AD – the young time cowboy we meet in Flesh Episode 1. A few months later we see him becoming a meal for spiders. 2000AD is what I’ve called ‘Sweeney-Fi’ – science fiction about hard bastards and anti-heroes, rooted more in the dystopian SF of the ‘New Hollywood’ mid-70s than in the matinee vibe George Lucas wanted to capture. There was a place for that tradition in Star Wars too – Han Solo and Chewbacca are very much 2000AD characters when we first see them, except they’re gradually reshaped by the sheer force of the heroic narrative they find themselves in.

Star Wars, like American superhero comics, was at heart a heroic fantasy, though one with enough hinted-at texture and mystery and villainous charisma to lure in viewers who thought Luke was a bit of a sap. But heroic fantasy was what the entire Mills/Wagner/Finley-Day project had set itself against: plucky youngsters succeeding against the odds was the stuff of the Boy’s Own Paper, not Battle or Action. 70s kids wanted redder meat, until suddenly they apparently didn’t.

Star Wars could absorb 2000AD heroes: 2000AD could not yet assimilate Star Wars. Ironically, the closest Dan Dare ever came to matching Lucas was when Massimo Belardinelli was drawing it in early 1977, before anyone had seen the film. Belardinelli revelled in the fantastic side of space opera, drawing freaky aliens any Cantina would welcome into their Jizz ensemble. Gibbons, on the other hand, produces some of his least charismatic work on this phase of the strip – chunky, inelegant spaceships which look like they’re made from duplo blocks; aliens from mediocre B-movies; and a “Dark Lord” with a ludicrous helmet and joke shop moustache. “Star Slayers” ends up becoming the worst thing a Star Wars lift could be: charmless.  

That’s not to say Star Wars didn’t end up influencing 2000AD. The centre of gravity in visual science fiction shifted overnight: Star Wars eventually influenced everyone. What the Dan Dare strip proved is that the space operatic component of Star Wars wasn’t something 2000AD could successfully imitate and keep its tone intact. But Dan Dare had always been an awkward fit with that tone, and the rest of what made kids love Star Wars – weirdo aliens, a wild west galaxy, droids aplenty – could absolutely chime with the 2000AD way of doing things. Over the next couple of years we’ll see a far more successful post-Star-Wars style filter into the comic. “Star Slayers” stands as an awkward, failed, but necessary prototype. 

GALACTIC GOTHIC

Having made an intriguing try at being Star Wars before people really knew what Star Wars was, Dare switches back to its previous setting: being Star Trek instead. The original series of Star Trek found a basic structure for episodic science fiction that works extremely well. First the cast meets an exotic, dangerous or inexplicable situation, then a set of reveals or reversals uncover the true nature of the conflict, and finally we have a resolution.

The middle stretch of 2000AD’s Dan Dare borrows the format wholesale, though Trek has a fairly obvious advantage – even James T Kirk has more of a personality than Dare, not to mention the rest of his crew. So Star Trek stories gain an extra dimension from seeing how these particular people react to the strange worlds they find (and, of course, the worlds themselves can be engineered by writers to play off particular aspects of the crew’s personalities). But nobody reading Dan Dare is thinking “I wonder what Hitman and Bear will make of this”, and Dan has no character to speak of either, just a limitless fund of resourcefulness and determination.

Still, it’s unfair perhaps to criticise Dan Dare for what it isn’t, when his Trek mode does actually deliver entertaining stories. In the last Dare entry I talked about the first bits of the Finley-Day/Gibbons run, where the various pieces – tough guy characters, space opera hardware, whimsical plots – didn’t quite fit together. After the Starslayers story, Chris Lowder (writing as Jack Adrian) becomes the main scripter and the stories find more solid footing.

Lowder had been at IPC since the late-60s, one of the first fans to break into professional UK comics alongside his friend Steve Moore. By the time 2000AD launched he had a decade’s experience and a reputation for speed and reliability when other writers were having deadline trouble. A major writer for Action – the notorious Kids Rule OK was his strip, and he delighted in having Dredger shoot a priest – Lowder felt less affinity with science fiction but his versatility still means he has a rack of late 70s 2000AD credits.

Lowder’s take on Dare is an immediate step up after the starslayers sprawl, opening with a tight story where a floating space sarcophagus unleashes a body-stealing menace on Dare and his crew. Some of the improvement is simply down to Lowder taking more episodes to tell each story: in the opening “Lost Worlds” strips Finley-Day favoured two-partners, which don’t allow much more than a twist and resolution. Lowder’s are often twice as long, which creates a lot more room for the reader to feel like they’re exploring a planet and figuring it out at the same time Dare is.

Look at the 6-part “Garden Of Eden”, which has the same basic story to the 2-part Finley-Day one about the idyllic planet secretly run by vampires. Both tales telegraph strongly that the planet is a false paradise, but Lowder includes a lot more bizarre detail, at the expense of sense but not of entertainment. Why the carnivorous worm aliens disguise themselves as 17th Century pilgrims who were abducted by a UFO is open to question. But it makes for a great fake reveal while the wider background problem of their treachery bubbles away. It’s typical of Lowder’s work on the strips, which often recasts images from 20th century horror – zombie-like clones, undersea monstrosities, a morass of tentacles – in sci-fi dress.

The other thing Lowder gets right goes back to Dare’s initial success in 2000AD, when Belardinelli was providing the art. He gets that Dan Dare is the one regular 2000AD strip which can give readers a weekly dose of wildly alien visual weirdness, and he makes sure to pack his scripts with memorable things for Dave Gibbons to draw. Rotting vegetable duplicates of Dare and his crew! An ice pyramid the size of Everest! The mountainous Slurrg Mother – not the first terrifying maternal figure the 2000AD boys had served up. All of them with a fair chance to scorch the brain of the excited reader, even if the plots were borrowed from the SF pulps.

Not everything Gibbons cooks up is a success – it’s hard not to laugh when the script expects us to be terrified of the flying mouth “Snappers”. But his clean-lined, muscular style works well for Lowder’s well-paced storytelling. Dan Dare at this point is finally beginning to feel like an update of the old heroic figure, rather than a punky reaction against it. Whether that’s a good fit for 2000AD is open to serious question – by definition, Dare was always likely to feel like the most old fashioned thing in the comic, and under Lowder and Gibbons his adventures seem to have slipped back half a decade. 

But as we’ll see, by the spring of 1978 the comic badly needed a strip like this, an anchor that could serve up reliable adventure stories with strong art so Dredd didn’t have to carry the title alone. And despite the editorial team’s constant clashes with IPC management over content, the 2000AD of early 1978 was less radical than the comic that launched a year before. When I talked earlier in this post about how the “sweeney-fi” vision of 2000AD as a gritty action comic clashed with the more optimistic tone of Star Wars, I was being a little disingenuous. By the time Star Wars was released, 2000AD was already veering away from that concept.

The editorial team of Kelvin Gosnell and Nick Landau were firm comics and science fiction fans – the original concept of doing a sci-fi comic in the first place was Gosnell’s. But to run a sci-fi comic you need to answer the question, what is sci-fi? And more specifically: what kinds of sci-fi work best in a weekly, serial, visual format? Sweeney-fi had been an excellent, but idiosyncratic answer to that, born out of the skills Pat Mills and the initial writers honed on weekly war and action titles.

With 2000AD’s initial stories winding down, and Starlord’s chaotic launch meaning he suddenly had to fill two weekly sci-fi comics, Gosnell didn’t have the luxury of such a definable vision of what science fiction was. Maybe his own ideas were less radical too. In any case, the scramble for new stories from IPC’s stable of creators meant falling back on a more generic version of SF. And because comics are a visual medium, that meant not just Star Trek but the B-Movies of the 50s and 60s. The planetary romance of Dan Dare and Death Planet shared space with the pulp invasion and monster stories Colony Earth and Ant Wars. Dare had gone from being the odd man out in an aggressively 70s comic, to a reliable fixture in something which seemed far less brutally modern.

BUCCANEER BANZAI

But not for long. Dare had the pulling power (or more cynically, the grandparent recognition power) to secure an annual of his own in Autumn 1978, but it came just as he was losing his slot in the comic. When 2000AD and Starlord merged Dare took a break for several months, before returning in the spring for one last attempt to make a version that worked for 2000AD. His final two 1978 stories – the last of the Lowder/Gibbons work and a concluding all-hands-on-deck rush job mostly scripted by Nick Landau himself – are an unceremonious end to the Trek-influenced era, a poor reward for helping hold the comic together alongside Dredd for so long. Thirty issues before, Dare had been the regular cover star. Now he got the Inferno treatment – stories designed to bring his adventures to a brutal end, wiping out Finley-Day’s supporting cast to a man.

It’s doubtful anyone shed tears for “Pilot” Polanski, Hitman and the rest, and they do at least get moderately heroic death scenes – Bear, whose personality never developed beyond “big guy with a Russian accent”, gets to fight an actual space bear, which is more exciting than he probably deserved. Dare himself is left abandoned in space, ready to be picked up by some other creators. His peremptory treatment is likely another reflection of the tensions in the 2000AD office, where Landau – who had objected to the Dare story spilling onto the cover – was in control while Gosnell struggled with Star Lord. 

Landau didn’t have a lot of comics experience but he had a taste for edgier, more violent stories where twists and surprises counted for more than sense. His “Doomsday Machine” storyline (with Henry Miller and Roy Preston co-credited) is a narrative mess, full of arbitrary shifts in focus and story elements that go nowhere. And yet however technically incompetent the results are, there’s an intensity to this story of Dare exploring a colossal, abandoned spaceship, drawn by Trevor Goring and Garry Leach as full of shadows and ancient horrors. “The Doomsday Machine” reminds me of the earliest Dare in 2000AD, heavy on spectacle, but with a cosmic horror twist. Even as he throws around fannish in-jokes for the real heads (the lone survivor of an ancient race is called “Moebius”), Landau is at least trying to communicate the sense that a Dan Dare story could have stakes.

In the 75-year history of Dan Dare it’s unlikely many readers place the Lost Worlds ‘saga’ at the top of a favourite story list. But it has a place in that history. Whatever the contingencies of Dare’s arrival at 2000AD, whatever his exact role in that or any comic, Dan Dare the character is always a cipher key for Britishness; his origins as an expression of space-age British confidence linger. Even swinging fists in a pilot jacket he’s an imperial symbol, and his later comics history addresses that directly.

Lost Worlds doesn’t exactly, but the simple presence of Dare makes that a lens we should look at the story through. How does this incarnation of Dare relate to Empire? The exact political status of the Lost Worlds is deeply unclear, as are the precise objectives of Dare and his space fort. He’s being sent out to them officially, but with a crew of the discredited and criminal, under a flag of convenience, and his mission is – or turns out to be – a suicide run. 

Dare in these stories has a freebooter’s license, and his exploits hark back not to the Empire but to pre-Imperial Britain, casting Dare as a kind of Francis Drake of the stars, raiding and ultimately overthrowing a rival power while swashbuckling his way across perilous lands unknown, filling out the map of space. Like an Elizabethan buccaneer he faces mutiny and strife, with the final stories casting Dare as a driven martinet, leading his crew ultimately to death and disaster. But unlike Drake, Dare is denied a heroic ending to his grand adventure. The late 70s is no time for golden voyages, and in its chaotic, cynical finale this version of Dan Dare becomes one the era deserves.

HOW TO READ IT: These Dan Dare stories are split across two volumes of Dan Dare – The 2000AD Years. The Star Slayer epic is in Volume 1, and the Lowder and Landau stories are in Volume 2.

RECOMMENDED?: Star Slayer is for completists only, but there’s a couple of solid SF adventure strips in the Lowder run where Dave Gibbons gets to have more fun – try “Doppelganger” and “Garden Of Eden”.

NEXT PROG: Pat Mills and artist Trigo bring us a story which was slated for Prog 1 of 2000AD but dropped. Body horror, insanity and rage in the short but very intense The Visible Man.

Mills meanwhile had moved on to create a new comic, 2000AD, which applied the Action formula to science fiction, after a memo from IPC staffer Kelvin Gosnell shrewdly predicted a coming wave of interest in the genre. 2000AD launched in the shadow of the Action controversy, but had a major advantage – its violence was against cyborgs, dinosaurs, and fictional invaders and was thus safer.

Even so, Mills left little to chance. Disliking typical sci-fi tropes like robots he developed more down to earth stories, each of which could credibly be a reader favourite, with strong, anti-authoritarian heroes in common. A revival of 50s legend Dan Dare led the charge, but bionic secret agent MACH 1 and future cop Judge Dredd – created by Mills’ close collaborator John Wagner – were the strips that hit hardest with readers. Tying the comic together was fictional editor Tharg, an egotistical alien whose invented language became a shared vocabulary for fans. 

But the most important decision Mills took was to raise the page count per story from the 3 or 4 pages standard in Action to 5 or 6, allowing much more room for the dynamic artwork he knew a science fiction comic would need. This in turn let him attract a new generation of British artists like Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Mick McMahon and his editorial assistant Kevin O’Neill, whose work would come to define the look of 2000AD.

2000AD was a strong launch, and developed rapidly over its first year, with Mills’ anti-authoritarian venom meshing well with the streak of dark humour Wagner brought to Dredd and polar bear saga Shako. Mills stepped back from editorial duties after a few months, handing over to Kelvin Gosnell. 2000AD’s first year was a success, but multiple challenges loomed. The promised wave of interest in SF was breaking, with the UK release of Star Wars. The original line-up of strips were coming to a natural end, and replacements were needed. The more conservative elements of IPC management were deeply unsure about the noisy, maverick team who produced the comic. And John Sanders, the IPC Youth Group boss, was already planning 2000AD’s successor…  

DISCOURSE 2000: 1978

1. Dance Our Way Out Of Our Constrictions: INTRO
2. DAN DARE ’78
3. THE VISIBLE MAN
4. COLONY EARTH
5. MACH 1 ’78/ MACH ZERO
6. WALTER THE WOBOT
7. JUDGE DREDD: THE CURSED EARTH
8. DEATH PLANET
9. ANT WARS

The history of 2000AD is partly the history of overlapping groups of creators – I want to say “factions” but that’s not really fair; they aren’t usually in any kind of conflict, and their borders are porous – who are prominent and influential over the comic at different times. 1978, one of the most turbulent periods in 2000AD’s history, is partly a moment of transition between these groups – between, in fact, different ideas of what a science fiction comic is and could be. 

The axes that separate the groups are often their relationships to IPC, and to comics fandom, and to 2000AD itself. In the late 70s – and beyond – IPC itself sees comics as product, like any other periodical. They are produced in bulk, as they have been for decades, and the only important standards to measure them by are sales and profitability. This isn’t to say quality is irrelevant to IPC. Like anyone in the business of commercial art, quality is important to them inasmuch as it’s important to their end customers, who are subject to continual churn (kids get older and grow out of comics) and are alert to changing fashions and peer group tastes: no kid wants to be passing an uncool comic around the playground. 

So quality matters to IPC because it’s an effective source of competitive advantage that pushes sales up. It’s a lever to pull, like price or promotional activity or distribution advantages, and part of what gives IPC any reputation it might have among its primary customers, the retailers. But this definition of quality doesn’t leave a great deal of room for novelty or risk.

So the first group of creators are the professionals. These are people in editorial, and some of the veteran creators who work on 2000AD early on, like writer Tom Tully. They are broadly aligned with the IPC view of comics – at their best they produce strips to a high degree of craft and skill and reliability (especially in terms of the artwork) at the behest of editors with a solid grasp on what kids will enjoy and buy. For much of the early history of 2000AD, the highest selling IPC boys’ paper is Tiger, which did this very well while pushing almost no boundaries.

But by the mid 70s things are changing. They see the rise of a younger group of creators who we’ll call the rebels, obviously led by Pat Mills and John Wagner and also including Kelvin Gosnell in his editorial days and later Alan Grant. The rebels are new blood with a forthright view that kids want something harder edged and more streetwise than IPC have been giving them. 

But they have something vitally important in common with the ‘professionals’: both approaches believe in 2000AD as a pop phenomenon, a mass market proposition whose value, artistically as well as commercially, lies in grabbing the imagination of as many kids as possible. John Sanders isn’t repeatedly hiring Pat Mills to create comics because Mills is an iconoclast; he’s hiring Mills because Mills has the ability to give Sanders what he wants – commercial, successful publications. 

The context in which people like Mills and Wagner get freer rein is a context of decline. IPC are an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of a company – if Sanders is asking a guy like Mills to fix things, chances are something’s broke. British comics sales for older kids – tweens, let alone teens – are falling long-term across the 1970s, pushed aside by other media: TV and cinema mainly get the blame. Mills’ idea is that the way to fight this trend is to use comics to present an exaggerated, more vibrant (and sometimes violent) take on what kids are seeing – or not being allowed to see – elsewhere. 

And this is the main difference between the rebels and the professionals. Mills and company had come to realise this could only be done by creating as distinctive an identity as possible outside the rest of IPC, and insisting on the changes that would cement that while delivering greater artistic freedom, from Mills’ decision to run longer story lengths to Kevin O’Neill’s unilateral addition of creator credits. (Mills is still a passionate believer in a mass market for comics, pointing to France, where his Requiem: Vampire Knight series has been a success)

In the short to medium term, this works. IPC’s successful 70s launches slow, even sometimes temporarily stop, the long-term decline in comics readers, and as a slice of the publisher’s business the Youth Group grows more prominent. But the overall decline continues – sales leaders Tiger and Tammy are gone by 1985, and when 2000AD is sold to Robert Maxwell’s Fleetway in 1988, it’s reportedly selling about 100,000 copies a week – a very strong figure for the time but a number that might have got it cancelled a decade earlier. 

But the rebels’ success means that something happens: 2000AD, unlike any previous IPC comic, gets the attention, and very quickly the warm approval, of comics fandom. And so we have a third group: the fans. The fan element are into American comics and broader sci-fi media – if you look at fanzines from 1977, British comics are barely worth a mention. Fans shape 2000AD from the beginning: the British “golden generation” of artists like Gibbons and Bolland all loved Silver Age DCs, and were doing regular fanzine work while making a shift to professional art via the British weeklies. 

Editorially, fan involvement in 2000AD also starts very early, with Nick Landau’s recruitment as assistant editor after he got hold of Mills for a fanzine interview. Landau isn’t much of a creator, and he never officially edits the comic, but he’s one of the most significant figures in the story of 2000AD in 1978. He’s from the same fan scene as later editors Richard Burton and Alan McKenzie, and by the time he joined 2000AD he was already running an import and distribution service for US comics.

The fan element has a distinct aesthetic approach to 2000AD, and to comics in general. To the professionals and the rebels, weekly comics publishing was a pop phenomenon: you wanted as broad an appeal as possible to capture a big chunk of your target market and create buzz and playground word of mouth. The fan element loves 2000AD as a showcase for comic artistry and for the SF genre, and to simplify, they see it as a chance to make UK comics credible and respectable.

The fans are, ultimately, trying to tackle the same problem as the professionals and rebels – how do you succeed within a declining market? You might think that the fan element aren’t as concerned about the money end of success, but this is far from the case. Nick Landau in particular is an entrepreneur; by the time he leaves 2000AD after an extremely significant year there, he doesn’t just have a distribution service, he’s a partner in Forbidden Planet, a specialist shop he set up because said distributor’s main customer was about to go under leaving them sitting on a heap of stock.

Landau’s vision of what British comics can be is as strong and important as Pat Mills’, but operating on very different assumptions. In one sense, the Mills and the Landau position are based around a classic marketing opposition – reach vs loyalty. The Pat Mills and IPC position is that what the UK comics industry needs is reach – finding more customers. Its main problem is that kids are stopping buying comics. If you tell stories that can compete with the most exciting things those kids are seeing elsewhere, more kids will buy your comic, and ultimately more kids will buy comics in general.

The Nick Landau and Forbidden Planet analysis of the situation, though, is based not on reach but on loyalty. New customers are good and important, but the decline in readership is a fact of life, and most of your growth is going to come from keeping and growing your existing customers, for instance by selling them merchandise, collected editions, introducing them to other comics, or just giving them the TV- and cinema-related items they want instead of comics.

From a broader perspective, both the loyalty and the reach approach mean a more profitable UK comics industry. From a “what should 2000AD be like?” perspective, though, they can imply different things. “Win over a wider audience” and “keep your fans loyal” are only compatible if you believe the fans are representative of the wider audience, and John Sanders and Pat Mills did not believe this. Which is why they were so cagey about bringing fans on board (Mills was impressed by Landau, but told him to keep his fandom quiet in his job interview).

But the miracle of early 2000AD turned out to be that you could, in fact, do both. The title was able to grow up with its early readership and give them more sophisticated material, meaning a mid-table sales performer for IPC turned into a market leader by sheer stability. Some of the claims for what it was selling are exaggerated but it seems to have been a remarkably stable comic until the late 80s, even as all its peers and competitors crumbled away.

As we move past the upheavals of 1978 and into the 1980s, this combination of mass market stability and fan friendliness will prove extremely powerful. Even as 2000AD remains far from entirely safe within IPC, and even though it’s still running a lot of jejune or downright bad material, it rapidly becomes the cultural centre of British comics at a time when the idea that British comics might involve more sophisticated or adult readers is on the rise. 

And this means it attracts a fourth group of creators, the outsiders: people who built their rep elsewhere in the burgeoning UK comics scene, on underground comix or music paper strips or post-2000AD alternatives like Warrior, but come in to work on 2000AD because it’s the biggest game in town. People like Alan Moore, Bryan Talbot, Pete Milligan, Grant Morrison and Brendan McCarthy. And this era, when 2000AD is simultaneously anti-establishment in traditional comic terms, and the new establishment for a rising generation of comics people, becomes the Prog’s most creatively exciting yet. Which leads, eventually, to a fifth group of creators – a wave of fandom where what people are a fan of is 2000AD itself.

This is all far in the future. In 1978, the question of what 2000AD is going to be is a very open one. The most significant event of the year is the launch of a second weekly IPC sci-fi comic, Star Lord, which splits the 2000AD editorial team, puts huge strain on creators, and could have spelt the end of the comic. Instead it’s 2000AD’s salvation, as Star Lord merges into the older title and brings its two best strips across.

So for the 1978 season of Discourse 2000 I’ll be splitting it into two halves. The first will look at the leftover stories from the launch – Dan Dare and MACH 1 – and the series of short replacement strips like Colony Earth and Death Planet which tried to fuse more traditional SF concepts with the 2000AD storytelling style. And it’ll consider Mills’ great epic contribution to Dredd’s mythology – The Cursed Earth.

The second half will kick off with a long exploration of the life and death of Star Lord, and the backstage turbulence around it. And then we’ll look at 2000AD’s late-78 renaissance, with the Star Lord imports, Robo-Hunter, and John Wagner’s return to Dredd with his saga of fascist insanity, The Day The Law Died.

Borag Thungg, readers, and I hope you enjoy yourselves.

Project background

Seven years ago today, I announced my intention to review every Omar Rodríguez-López solo album, which at the time totalled 53. This was largely influenced by the several dozen digital downloads released on a fortnightly schedule for most of 2016-17 which had inspired me to make a concerted effort to hear his entire back catalogue. I was really excited by the range of genres present, especially the pop records, and I wanted to signal boost my favourites. I also thought it might be fun to create a catalogue “of a fashion” so that I could educate myself on the progression of certain tracks and motifs and to chronicle my efforts in constructing a narrative across my experiences with them.

Time / mental budget

I began – quelle surprise! bursting with energy, believing I could complete two reviews a month and complete the project in about two years; maybe three, if I gave myself some leeway. I fell off that schedule almost immediately when I remembered I had other shit to do, and that really, really wishing it was otherwise does not stop me from being a slow-ass writer. Once I accepted I was in it for the long haul (I’d marry it’s fuckin’ ass), I was able to create a realistic timetable and mostly stuck to it.

Scope

I have not reviewed the entire ORL oeuvre: the below fell out of the project’s scope:

Challenges

I was already three months behind schedule in November 2019 when I was made redundant and promptly spiralled into panic and guilt-based freakouts. It’s well-known that falling out of habits is a lot easier than establishing a committed practice, but also it didn’t help that job-hunting left me exhausted and depressed and far more invested in my new project, watching all of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on Netflix. I knew I wasn’t ready to give up on Omargeddon, but I also began fretting I would give up, which would mean FAILURE. I finally posted the day before the first lockdown was announced, and got back on track once I secured a job (and one I really enjoyed) which meant I could focus on writing things that weren’t personal statements. I wish past-me could have watched Dr Tracey Marks’s excellent video about overcoming setbacks which would have been perfect for this situation. Thankfully, there were far more highlights.

Highlights

There is a kind of magic when you hear a record for the first time and it send chills down your spine, knowing this just the start of an evolving relationship: Un Escorpión Perfumado, Corazones, Umbrella Mistress, and Arañas en la Sombra in particular were such moments, and inspired me want to go back to my established favourites and see how they fit into the narrative.

Every review I’ve written was copyedited by my dear chum Glynnis, who always gave notes that were both helpful and encouraging. They asked me to explore some ideas a bit more, advised me on grammar and made suggestions for improvements in syntax. Knowing I had her help made letting go of the zero and first drafts a lot easier.

What also helped was that for the last two years, I’ve had the support of online accountability sessions capably cat-herded by the excellent Gemma and attended by various lovely Write Like A Grrrl alumni. Gemma would argue that she just sends the link and it’s up to us to show up and do the work – and she’s right – but also anyone who reliably sorts the admin is a hero – for real – and having dedicated time twice a week to write in companionship has been a real game changer and is a large part of why I was able to take on three big projects last June, and indeed, finish this one.

Lessons learned

I thought I could have some kind of comprehensive list denoting where Song A is reworked as Song B, or Song C, but that soon proved a fool’s errand since I soon realised that the release schedule was no indication of when the song was written, so I really couldn’t say with any confidence which element or motif was influencing another. The Cartesian graph of my febrile imagination will remain there to quietly influence my subconscious via abstract dreams.

The main lesson I learned – and only really properly understood this recently when engaging with end-of-year pop polls – is that I am incapable of ranking art. It’s not that I don’t love lists – I love a good Top Ten Books/TV Shows/whatever, and my life is structured around my bullet journal. But increasingly, I’ve accepted that I can’t in good faith place favourites in any meaningful order. I do find genres generally helpful for categorising, in that it helps me parse out what I’m craving, but to elevate one electro track as better than a Latin prog or indie rock, etc. is an insurmountable task which kind of makes me cranky. I guess to me, any kind of ranking is analogous to The Barnet Ape’s short lived ‘Condiment or Cereal’ game. I won’t pick one dammit, they are very different, two different things!

Recommendations

I thought about doing a playlist but it would be gargantuan, and we all know I’m an albums guy. I also just said I hated ranking shit and can’t pick favourites, but of the favourites I don’t have, “Houses Full of Hurt” sends me into floods of tears every damn time.

And I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t bring it all home with “Old Money”.

Conclusion

I’m very grateful to Tom for letting me use FreakyTrigger for this limited-appeal series :) I’m sure it won’t be long before there’s a new solo album, but I think as it stands, I’m donezo. Having said that, my first series for FreakyTrigger was an extremely silly Game of Thrones recap, which I began full of vim and vigour, and by the end swore I’d never recap another TV show ever again. And then I totally did, in even more laborious detail for Why, Claudius. You’ll be unsurprised to hear Shiny New Project Syndrome has already reared shkler head, and I’m considering a song-by-song exploration of the story/concept behind Frances the Mute which I don’t think I would have considered had I not undertaken Omargeddon. But as much as I enjoyed this project, I’m equally happy it has now concluded.

]]> https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2025/07/omargeddon-project-closure-report/feed 1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2025/07/omargeddon-55-is-it-the-clouds https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2025/07/omargeddon-55-is-it-the-clouds#respond Sun, 06 Jul 2025 08:16:02 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=35882

Omar Rodríguez-López’s most recent solo album Is It the Clouds? dropped January 2024 (aptly on the Clouds Hill label) and was the first to follow 2016-17’s epic release schedule. While it’s not quite a traditional concept album, themes of grieving and poor mental health are strong running motifs evident from the start. During a Spin magazine interview, he said “The record has a lot to do with the passing of my mother, but it is not as brutal as it would have been if I had done it back when she actually died…The sound of the album is pretty uniform, but the record has a bipolar feeling. That’s the paradox that is on this record, you’re losing the place where you came from, and while thinking that this will destroy you, exactly the opposite happens: You finally feel like a human being for the very first time. To finally have this feeling was the last gift she gave me.”

Lead single “Your Own Worst Enemy” was released on 01 December 2023, meaning that, much to my vexation, I couldn’t nominate it for Tom’s Bluesky 2024 pop poll. It would not have placed, but at least I’d get it into the monster playlist and add a few listens. Because my dudes – THIS FUCKING SONG! :D :D D: The feather-spitting fury of “Pineapple Face” / “Not Even Toad Loves You” from Sworn Virgins included the lyric “your life’s your punishment” – triumphant when sneered, even harsher here for its gormless placidity. Never ever was there a softer, sweeter clapback: the notes are light and airy, the chorus of aaahs returning to support the various ways in which ‘we’ bear ‘you’, a monstrous sociopath, whose life and mind are your punishment, no harm. Then again, it could just as easily be read as a second-person POV in which ‘you’ are talking smack to yourself. This song is praying for you, hon.

The reprise of “Broken” concludes one of ORL’s shortest albums – just under half an hour of sombre, crystalline pop. Is It the Clouds? couldn’t be further from the dense strata of his (moral) debut Omar Rodriguez, where lengthy improvised jam sessions were finessed and refined several times as part of the first step towards layering a whirlwind wall of sound and passion. The latest instalment in ORL’s impressive discography is a quiet, reflective study of mental anguish, both raw and confessional. And yet it’s also light enough to play with InstaTheraSpeak-isms with enough self-awareness to acknowledge its inevitable solipsism.

Track listing:
Is It the Clouds?
Mere Centimeter
Gently Tamed
Rat Pain
Once A Broken Human
Amor Frio
Which Came First
Your Own Worst Enemy
Solving This Again
Broken (Reprise)

]]> https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2025/07/omargeddon-55-is-it-the-clouds/feed 0 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2025/06/omargeddon-54-sworn-virgins https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2025/06/omargeddon-54-sworn-virgins#respond Tue, 17 Jun 2025 15:33:40 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=35872 As much as this idea totally whips, sadly, Sworn Virgins isn’t a concept album centred around the priestesses of Vesta, although it did inspire me to draft a fantasy longlist of musicians I’d like to see approach such a project.* As the very first record released in 2016’s tranche of Ipecac Recordings digital albums, it sounded the official death knell for entirely-solo ORL material. The Mars Volta wiki page for this album notes that: “Sworn Virgins was one of the last solo albums he [ORL] recorded before deciding that he ‘wanted to dedicate my time, while I’m still here, to collaborating with people and being a part of something and sharing things’.”

This pure-solo swan-song album is made up of material not reworked or mixed from earlier work, so the album launches the series with entirely new songs, although some tracks contain a few rare samples: “Crow’s Feet” / “Heart Mistakes” manipulates a lyric from John Lennon’s “How Do You Sleep?” and “Saturine” samples Invisible**’s “Durazno Sangrando”.

Although Sworn Virgins was composed on his tod, as is the case apart from a handful of albums, it does feature other studio musicians: Deantoni Parks on drums, keyboards and sampling and ORL credited with vocals, guitars and synthesisers/loops. I’m also reasonably certain that’s Teri Gender Bender I hear on some uncredited backup/duet vocals.

Maybe it’s because of the fact of its being the first release that I found so many reviews. I remember those days, and I was pumped for the fact that every two weeks another delicious album dropped. So the many contemporaneous reviews were fairly united in their often breathless praise: The Quietus noted “The record is high on staccato and pizzicato, closed-loops and the power of repetition, employing tension and release to superb effect”, while Smells Like Infinite Sadness described it as a “dizzying, elastic and eclectic release from a musician who has always defied easy categorization”. Louder Soundwas a bit more subdued, summing it up as “jarring, challenging and intriguing, sometimes disturbing and sometimes joyful. It’s certainly never boring”, and fan review stalwarts Prog Archives’ enthusiastic comments from Kempoid praise “…the song structures and abundance of hooks make for a very memorable and digestible listen that makes this one of the better places to jump into to start out.”

“Pineapple Face” / “Not Even Toad Loves You” is both a delightfully surreal burn and an excellent opening track. Fellow Volta expert and human par excellence Glynnis describes it as ‘like the Red Hot Chili Peppers as performed by ORL’. The first part is a short, sharp shock of precision-stabbed notes and intense loops paired with pitched-up vocals. Vocal distortion is not a huge favourite of mine except when deployed to intensify emotional impact, and this is a rare example where I feel it’s perfect. The raw, inchoate rage is palpable, and while the vocals gradually downpitch to his normal levels around the first f-bomb, ripples of this borderline-piercing energy remain. The second part ushered in with TGB’s uncredited backup vocals is a gorgeous textual juxtaposition: her creamy assertion “the fact that they don’t like you / and keep it secret / makes me your one true friend” contrasts with ORL’s frankly unhinged-sounding, repeated snarl “your life’s your punishment”. It’s really hard not to filter these lyrics through the subtweets and sideswipes that accompanied the breakup of the Mars Volta, but that story had a happy ending, at least.

The video, which was directed by ORL, is a fantastic visual of this meltdown. It opens with a pretty standard black and white video in which ORL appears in what looks like Bobbles Dilbo’s pretty era cosplay while Deantoni patiently noodles by his side. But as the video glitches and cracks, and graffiti-like scrawls increasingly take over and eventually splinter into sharp fractals, both men are totally obscured. It’s one of my favourite videos.

I’m less enamoured with the video for “To Kill a Chi Chi”, which combines body horror with food grossness. Both suit the scatological lyrics, but I can’t recommend it, which is a shame because the track itself is a polished gemstone of a Deantoni-driven banger. This description can be applied to most of Sworn Virgins: “High Water Hell” balances the heaviness of the continued vocal distortion with TGB’s countering vocals. “Saturine” slides an amuse-bouche into this tight 35-minute album before the next split track “Crow’s Feet” / “Heart Mistakes” leans hard on paranoid loops and lyrical trickery. “Logged Into Bliss” throws a seventies hard rock vibe into the mix with its crunchy guitar fun and judicious use of layering.

So far, so fun, but it’s “Trick Harpoon Stare of Baby” (*chef’s kiss*) that elevates all those elements. The magic of an ORL/TGB debut, plus the genius of Deantoni Parks delivers something between power pop and postpunk. Synth-rock loops, crunchy shred and a sick, thick beat are the apex of Sworn Virgins. Although less overtly aggressive, the sense of indignation is clear while never seeming illogical. It also serves as a kind of emotional codebreaker for the rest of the album, with all the best elements felt across the piece contained in less than four minutes.

The final split track “Fortuna” / “Twice a Plague” concludes the album on the opposite emotional side from the start. The shift from spitting feathers fury through rumination and snarly takedowns to inverting the motifs towards a more stripped-down sound without sacrificing any complexity and producing a tremendous intensity, like Jack and Meg back in the day.

I find it very interesting that this is considered the last solo ORL album when so much of its success is due to Deantoni Parks and Teri Gender Bender. Any ORL joint featuring the two of them is guaranteed to deliver a tight collection of hard-hitting tunes, and in this respect, Sworn Virgins does not disappoint. I’ll always prefer a clearer vocal mix to aggressive distortion, but when deployed well, as here, it complements the emotional drive.

I’ve said a few times that to every season there is an ORL, and if that season happens to be combative and rage-dumpy, you’re in for a treat. I’ve found that Sworn Virgins is an excellent lunchtime angry stomp-walk soundtrack for the days when a constant stream of doublespeak sends me frothing, when my best intentions are deliberately misconstrued, whenever I’m viewed as the lowest rung to kick in order to deliver someone having a shitty day with a wee blast of cruelty-driven serotonin. Music can’t cure any of this, but it does help channel some of this impotent rage out of myself and into where it belongs: the cracked and uneven pavements of London.

*It probably goes without saying, but this longlist includes the Mars Volta; see also PJ Harvey, Shilpa Ray, and Self Esteem.
**Wikipedia informs me that Invisible were a seventies Argentinian prog band, so that’s another one for the Spotify queue.

Track listing:
Pineapple Face
Not Even Toad Loves You
To Kill a Chi Chi
Trick Harpoon Stare of Baby
High Water Hell
Saturine
Crow’s Feet
Heart Mistakes
Logged Into Bliss
Fortuna
Twice a Plague

Hooray for me! Also several others, but it’s hard to get excited about that. Lucro sucio; Los ojos del vacio, the long-awaited Mars Volta double album I totally manifested is here at last, and it is a delightful compendium of traditional Puerto Rican sounds illustrated by Cedric’s heart-wrenching lyrics. All the wishes I made when I started this project have (kinda) come true. Technically, I wanted a triple-album and a week-long residency at a London venue (preferably south of the river: hollow laff), but that’s because I’m also greedy, in addition to be being nosy and opinionated.

Sometimes this dichotomy does have an advantage. “Tentáculos” – my old, familiar friend – continues a well-worn journey from the original to bring in newer elements while maintaining the claustrophobic power of “Agua Dulce de Pulpo”. A sci-fi zippiness adds a bit of air, supporting desultory vocals dripping a resigned half-boredom, like a foppish Victorian half-cut on laudanum who totally does not care if that saucy minx is giving him the eye or not. And while I also enjoy the hard-edged later versions of this song, the fuzzy production and thudding heart produce a successful blending of muted vibes with intensity.

Another example of this successful contrast between drums and vocals arrives later in “Gentle Umbrellas”. Vocal effects are drastically dialled down while maintaining the soft, fraying texture felt across the album. Contemplative mellotron pulses in tandem with the lyrics, and the track builds in intensity from these soft pulses, through a groovy middle eight. While the lyrics croon to the ‘you’ of the subject with increasing desperation, the track rises to a crescendo where the drums nearly overwhelm the vocals. 

But the same vocal/drum pairing incongruity fares less well on tracks like “Better to Hang a Dead Husband Than to Lose a Living Lover” and “Compartir (Sharing a Bus)”, which don’t offer enough variety and test my patience. Then again, at another time and in a different mood, I might find them as soothing as I do “Decided?”, a tinkly, pseudo-a cappella dreamscape that dodges the drum/vocal issue by not having any. The final track “Angel Hair” is a fitting conclusion, sighing romantic cliches I never wanted anyone / as much as I wanted you…don’t leave me dying here that would be misplaced on a slicker or harder-edged production. 

It’s this misguided idealisation bordering on toxic romance peppered throughout Saber that reminds me of Pulp’s Separations; dark electronica steeped in rock, with just a soupçon of the misogyny that stems from the sudden-but-inevitable disappointment after it transpires that the feminine mystique is a load of horseshit. I can’t say with any confidence how self-aware this is; regardless, the emotional effect is honest. 

As much as I reach for complex and multilayered rock, medically prescribed to be played as loud as possible in order to blast away difficult emotions, in my dotage I have begun to realise the importance of taking time to instead acknowledge these feelings. Saber, Querer, Osar y Callar is a fitting soundtrack for the wind-down of Omargeddon, prefacing a soft shuffle goodbye.

Track listing:
Home Lost
Habits
Gentle Umbrellas
Spellbound
Fear Eats the Soul
Better to Hang a Dead Husband Than to Lose a Living Lover
Tentáculos
Decided?
Compartir (Sharing a Bus)
Angel Hair

All ORL solo records are something of a history lesson and an indication of the energy and themes influencing the Mars Volta at the time. Solid State Mercenaries personnel features all three Volta drummers, from Jon Theodore to his replacement Thomas Pridgen, and then his replacement, Deantoni Parks. ORL takes guitar, vocals, keyboard and bass for a rare instance of a Juan Alderete de la Peña-free joint, with saxophone guest appearance from my favourite horn guy (not that one) Adrián Terrazas-González. Although the production itself is clean, this album carries a lot of the fuzzy vocal energy present on mid-era ORL albums.

Two tracks comprise elements from three other albums, which I was better able to excavate thanks to the Mars Volta wiki. “Try On Little Man” mashes up “Sueños Salvajes” from Equinox with “Bayamón, Puerto Rico” from Woman Gives Birth to Tomato! and while I always enjoy Thos Pridgen giving it his all, I’m not a huge fan of the source material, so I can’t say I’m much enamoured. “Lightning Round” is an alternate version of “Sequester Chagall” from Roman Lips; changing up the title and dicking around with the production to shift the mood and emotional output is standard practice for this cohort of ORL releases. The result here is a far more aggressive, and a lot chewier, but the overly distorted vocals have never been my favourite kind of this.

The strong reverb on the vocals is most evident in the first half of the album, and later tracks are generally more coherent, but for the most part, I cannot understand a goddamn word he’s singing, especially when softer vocals are deployed, as in “Killing Out the Special Tide” and “Strangled Maybes”. While this situation is nowhere near as frustrating as the mudslide that is Unicorn Skeleton Mask, the lyrics on Solid State Mercenaries are only slightly more comprehensible. And this is a real shame, because they are good-ass lyrics, and while I do appreciate this adds an edge to the general belligerency across the piece, it winds up being too much of a muchness.

But this isn’t always the case, as on “Your Hazard Name”, where effects have been dialled down to a whisper of a delay that enhances the interiority of this breakup song. It’s one without much vitriol, just a lot of resignation: I never give anything / you give the runaround / it’s the same game / you’re a dime a dozen. The listless thrum pulsing in and out, like the slow death of a relationship, eventually accepting blame on both sides.

But where fun and funky collide, the vibe shifts away from the earlier belligerence. “Five Star” has a light jazzy motif that lounges in the background, contrasting with its intense beat, sultry sax and bratty vocals. This is the sort of barely restrained mayhem that manages to balance the layers perfectly: simultaneously fast and stupid as well as slow and seductive. While there’s a pant leg of the Trousers of Time where “Five Star” is a sprawling 20-minute-long centrepiece, I think wrapping it all up in under four minutes is equally impressive given the extended outro. All the ingredients do make for an admittedly strange brew, but it works.

Even shorter is the blistering “Mommy Dearest”, the single instrumental track. In just over two minutes, a box of textural delights explodes: a thick, groovy beat leading with bold swagger through glossy near-shred that stretches out into spacerock. Unlike Johnny Caspar, I am very much NOT sick of the hi-hat, and my only real complaint is that this song is far too short. Having said that, its abrupt ending is just the kind of irreverential silliness I medically require.

In a weird way, Solid State Mercenaries is akin to my Bobbles Dylbo dilemma. But with him, I broadly appreciate the music and lyrics but wish the vocalist were someone else (and let’s face it, that someone is Cedric Bixler-Zavala, who I wish would sing most things), whereas I adore ORL’s vocals but wish the delivery weren’t fucked up with the decision to throw it through the warp-o-matic. If the vocals were stripped off this record, I’d listen the shit out of it: there’s dope shred, excellent textural complexity and always a sick beat. Still, there’s enough to love, and I’m glad I gave it more attention.

* Having said that, the image does come from the video for Bosnian Rainbows’ “Turtle Neck”, which is an absolute tune. That video also provided the image used for the original, digital cover artwork for Azul, Mis Dientes, although this has since been updated when Clouds Hill pressed it on vinyl.

Track listing:
Bought Some Faith
Sinister Page
Congenial Censor
Lightning Round
Killing Out the Special Tide
Five Star
Strangled Maybes
Mommy Dearest
Your Hazard Name
Try On Little Man

]]> https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2025/04/omargeddon-52-solid-state-mercenaries/feed 0 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2025/03/omargeddon-51-omar-rodriguez https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2025/03/omargeddon-51-omar-rodriguez#respond Fri, 14 Mar 2025 10:40:29 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=35848 I’m inclined to think of Omar Rodriguez as the first official ORL solo record, even though that’s not technically correct. And yet, my predilection for proving myself to be the best kind of correct is overridden when I consider a couple of factors. A Manual Dexterity: Soundtrack Volume I preceded it by a year and a half, but I think there’s a clear delineation between representing the aural side of a visual medium and an album that creates its own cohesive universe, rather than serving to enhance existing media.

Another factor is that Omar Rodriguez is the first in the Amsterdam series (including Se Dice Bisonte, No Búfalo, The Apocalypse Inside of an Orange and Calibration (Is Pushing Luck and Key Too Far)), which was recorded when he lived in that city. The cover artwork is by Julio Venegas, who was fictionalised as Cerpin Taxt for the Mars Volta’s debut Deloused in the Comatorium, and I think it’s worth noting that while most of the ORL oeuvre was provided with updated covers when his back catalogue was pressed (or re-pressed), Omar Rodriguez is one of the few that remained unchanged. It probably has something to do with IP/legal crap when the digital catalogue issued by Ipecac Recordings passed to Clouds Hill, but I prefer to think that for various sentimental reasons, Omar Rodriguez is a bit like the DNA set in amber, to be preserved for antiquity, marking the first official album-album and launching the start of his parallel solo career.

Personnel is broadly aligned with the Mars Volta Group lineup of that era, including Cedric Bixler-Zavala guesting his tambora skills, which also gives heft to my argument that this is the moral-first ORL record, since the line betwixt ORL and TMV at this time was very blurry indeed. Like much of the Amsterdam series, a good deal of the material was improvised, with Pitchfork calling it ‘jazz-oriented’, while Sputnikmusic preferred ‘jazz fusion’, although I suppose it amounts to the same thing. Incidentally, for your edification, the first time I learned about ‘jazz fusion’ as a genre was in an oft-run Comedy Central commercial with a clip of a stand-up routine where the comic was dunking on overly stylised answering machine messages (“Ooh – Joel’s into jazz fusion!”). Every single time I saw that commercial – which, I cannot stress enough, was often, since I spent most of my teenage years obsessed with Comedy Central – I rolled my eyes because The Kids In The Hall already did, and did it better, dammit!

It’s something of a happy coincidence that I waited until the series has almost finished before writing about Omar Rodriguez, because I suspect if I’d written this series in chronological order to the album release, I wouldn’t have noticed how much of a template this record sets for early era ORL solo albums. The jazz elements of improvisation and a strong focus on woodwinds for songs that are reworked for Mars Volta material is par for the course for this period, and I suspect the shorter segue tracks were composed afterwards to tie them together into a cohesive piece.

“Een Ode Aan Ed van der Elsken” opens with a crystalline splash through sleigh bells and minimal thrumming, while the penultimate track “Vondelpark Bij Nacht” is a slow, ponderous dance between squeaky intrusion and airy sitar that is reminiscent of the opening and closing tracks on Amputechture. “Regenbogen Stelen Van Prostituees” throws more guitar into the mix, although it is just a scooch crowded out with some pretty aggressive shrillness, though there is enough movement and progression to compensate. I envy the live versions performed at this time, which I imagine could easily be a glorious three-quarters of an hour.

The first movement of “Jacob van Lennepkade” is coquettish and understated, gradually coaxing in some funky guitar to spar with the woodwinds, and anchored by the “Viscera Eyes” bassline. While this version is less shred-heavy than its sequel, The Apocalypse Inside of an Orange’s “Jacob van Lennepkade II”, the second movement does share the salsa grooves and crunchier texture. Around the six-minute mark is one of my happiest of happy places, where I have to stop what I’m doing every time I hear it just to grin like the prize-winning dork I am. The final movement demands to be played as loudly as possible, and while normally for a track this long I’d struggle with this level of shrill, the alternating textures across the movements help usher in a near discordant conclusion. I really enjoyed listening to “Jacob van Lennepkade II” directly afterwards, and then “Viscera Eyes” for the aural history lesson in how an improv jam session developed into a version that added a denser texture and heavier beat, and in turn, became a vehicle for Cedric Bixler-Zavala to have a pop at organised religion.

I listen to music for almost entirely emotional reasons, even if the emotion is ‘I need to concentrate on this piece of writing’ or ‘I need to mask the sound of the man in the flat below effing and jeffing at someone so loudly it penetrates the maisonette directly below me, like a scary version of Brian Blessed and Simon Cowell playing chess’. “Spookrijden Op Het Fietspad” is music for HOORAY FUN. Most of this album gives heavy Amputechture vibes, for good reason, but I’m feeling lots of Old Money here, and as must be very evident by now, this is a wonderful thing. All the ingredients for a classic ORL instrumental groove are present and correct: a sick beat that demands attention, a salsa groove that’s almost impossible not to wriggle-chair dance to, bountiful shred, Juan’s magical stamina and woodwinds on the cusp of belligerence. It’s the perfect kind of outro, one that invigorates even with a soft, tinkly fade-out.

Omar Rodriguez represents the middle section of the Venn diagram between jazz and rock, and while parts of it border on taxing without ever being hard work, it’s never for very long. Because it’s such a comprehensive example of ORL’s process, I must insist this is the first ORL solo record, even though it isn’t. It makes me appreciate – and want to listen to – Amputechture; this album is its origin story and one I feel privileged to experience.

Track listing:
Een Ode Aan Ed van der Elsken
Regenbogen Stelen Van Prostituees
Jacob van Lennepkade
Vondelpark Bij Nacht
Spookrijden Op Het Fietspad

]]> https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2025/03/omargeddon-51-omar-rodriguez/feed 0 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2025/02/omargeddon-50-mantra-hiroshima https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2025/02/omargeddon-50-mantra-hiroshima#respond Mon, 10 Feb 2025 13:16:46 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=35834 Labelling music as ‘psychedelic’ is about as useful as labelling it as ‘progressive’. Both are wildly subjective terms, and both are frequently deployed when defining Omar Rodríguez-López’s extensive catalogue. I’d like to see a handy Venn diagram illustrating where those two genres intersect, although, given the complexity, an extensive family tree like the one Jack Black showed his students in School of Rock might prove a more useful visual. But to the point, if the definition of psychedelic can be agreed on as the liberal use of guitar distortion and effects during lengthy, meandering solos of all instrumental varieties and the tendency for its fans to proselytise complementing the music with mind-expanding substances, then Mantra Hiroshima is definitively psychedelic. 

Although it was released in 2010, it hearkens back to his earliest solo work where he not only produced but also performed on most of the instruments. And knowing his propensity to allow music to marinate in his extensive vault for years before release, this may very well be the case, although the personnel might suggest otherwise. On bass, there’s Juan Alderete de la Peña with his golden thread-like bass; I want to award him the late, great Phil Hartman’s sobriquet “Glue” for his near-magic abilities to seamlessly bring it all together. Finally, on drums is the powerhouse Zach Hill, who appeared on 2009’s Cryptomnesia and whose presence ensures Mantra Hiroshima is a full-on rock explosion. 

And yes, there is a good deal of shred involved, which I’m suitably smitten with, as per my wont, but I’m also enamoured with the airy layers of noodle and playful improvisation that exude pure joy. The track list mixes short and ultra-short segues that set up the mood and provide smooth transitions into the lengthier pieces. “Acerca de la Vida” is a 20-second teaser of thick beats and trippy guitar that leads into “On the First Look”. Clearly I’m shred-focussed by nature and temperament, but I’m also really taken with the shivery synths. A later segue track “Reason and Understanding” links the uncompromising intensity of “Los Tres “Yo’s” (which honestly is something of an endurance test) with a funky blast of potentially improvised funbos, making me question yet again why I can’t get on with jazz, especially since I really enjoy “Hope”, a busy track that is heavy on the jazzy synths.

The delicious slow burn of “El Oyente” opens with a hint of menace: keys slicked with a jazz-aligned ‘70s groove slipping around gentle repetitive guitar ever increasing in intensity. The old (albeit stupid and wrong) adage about boiling frogs comes to mind in how it gradually progresses from soft and languid to dense and full-on. It’s not not-shred; it’s somewhere between shred and noodling, solidly anchored with some beautiful bass from Juan, who just may be some kind of wizard. It’s the perfect length, with enough time to layer a crisp, harmonious foundation and then dismantle it before it overstays its welcome.

El Hacer*

There is always the moment on an exceptional ORL instrumental album that, to me, anchors the whole piece and becomes something akin to its raison d’être. “El Hacer” has it all from the start, an intro that sashays into the space full of louche insouciance. The two-minute mark is the kind of ORL solo that I could happily live out the rest of my days lost in, and should I ever find myself in the fabled Comatorium, it would form part of the soundtrack. Some of the tracks suffer from a bit too much repetition, but there is enough pulsing across soft half-breaks to vary the texture, while always returning to a joyous rock rampage. And just when you think Zach Hill can’t continue without his arms falling off, it flows into a soft outro that smokes a fag and drifts off into satisfied slumber.

“Sobre la Resurrección”, the final and longest track, does test my patience with its crinkly texture and effects that shriek and scratch. There’s also a protracted portion of what sounds like a sulky guitar string twanging a one-note interruption that goes on for way too long, like an impatient child tugging their parent’s sleeve demanding attention, and it becomes stand-off waiting for the child to either wear themselves out or get distracted by something shiny (in this case Zach Hill doing his Animal impression). But once the first half is endured, it does return to some semblance of control.

It’s hard not to think of Mantra Hiroshima as part of a duology with Cryptomnesia, simplifying its dense kaleidoscope of blended textures and instruments without compressing the intensity. A large part of that is, for an album with very little delegation, it’s hard to deny that Mantra Hiroshima is ultimately a Zach Hill joint: I came for the shred, but I stayed for the balls-out drumming. Thanks to the awful convenience of Spotify, I finally got around to listening to Hella and can happily report that it hits in the same way this record does. 

*YouTube is dicking me around so I can’t embed :/

Track listing
Acerca de la Vida
On the First Look
El Oyente
Mastering Death
Los Tres “Yo’s”
Reason and Understanding
El Hacer
Hope
Sobre la Resurrección

New Year’s Day 2013 kicked off another prolific year for ORL, with the release of both Equinox, and Woman Gives Birth to Tomato! This album is credited to the Omar Rodríguez-López Group, with personnel consisting of Adrián Terrazas-González on various woodwinds, Mark Aanderud on piano and percussion, drumming from Marcel R-L, with Omar providing guitar, synthesisers/sequences and producing. Each track is named after a city he lived in (possibly in sequential order), starting with Bayamón, Puerto Rico and ending with Tokyo, Japan, although this is actually a half-minute of silence rather than an actual song.

Full ten out of ten marks for the excellent title…and then I got nothing. This is jazz – free jazz, to be precise, and I’ve never been further out of my depth. I would love to love this record or, at the very least, have an opinion and, by extension, something to say about it. But I have even less to say than I did about Doom Patrol, which was functionally nothing. For that record I was able to scribble some basic notes against each track, whereas here I managed exactly el zilcho.

And I hate that for me, because when I say, ‘I don’t get jazz’, I’m reminded of how my mother claims she ‘doesn’t like Indian food’. Both assertions are lazy and kind of icky: There are many types of jazz from all over the world, just as India is a massive country with several different culinary traditions. In some form of defence of us both, Ma is a boomer who grew up in a very homogeneous midwestern USA town with little exposure to international cuisine (and, it could be argued, food with flavour) and of all the various genres and sub-genres, free jazz does genuinely appear to be the most uncompromising, complicated and least accessible sort. If only a man would take time to properly explain it to me while I pranced around in a yellow frock.

What I hate even more is my baffling inconsistency, because when I outline the aspects of the music on this record that I don’t enjoy, I contradict myself. Thing 1: It’s just sort of background music with weird bits that claw my attention away from what I’m working on. Thing 2: The shrillness – please make it stop, it sounds like a sound effect created by garbled AI titled ‘robot Stevie Nicks snaps after hours of interrogation by journalists repeatedly asking the same question’. And yet, I fucking love The Bedlam In Goliath, a record that has moments where the very same Adrián Terrazas-González could be accused of attempted murder via flute, and my favourite background music will frequently force me to stop what I’m doing to focus on it instead.

With a catalogue as extensive as ORL’s, I was never going to love every single record, and this is where I have to say I gave it the old college try, but had to throw in the towel. But maybe in a few years time I’ll listen again, and be better able to appreciate the intricate sophistication and musicianship. In this world, I will also have read In Search of Lost Time, perfected a sourdough recipe and learned how to control the VOLUME OF MY VOICE. Not all my goals are realistic, but they are joyously pointless.

Track listing:
Bayamón, Puerto Rico
Puebla, México
El Paso, Texas
Long Beach, California
Amsterdam, Holland
Brooklyn, New York
Zapopan, México
Tokyo, Japan

In the ancient times, when I was old enough to know better but young enough to believe it didn’t matter, when LiveJournal was the central focus of my socialisation, at this time of year my reading feed was dominated by a popular end-of-year survey. The questions were fairly standardised, though there was some variation as people replaced or skipped those they didn’t fancy revealing. I was far more invested in reading people’s answers than I was in divulging my own tedious, samey responses, though I felt obligated to take part as some kind of payment; the kind of stupid, self-imposed rule I’m only finally beginning to escape. 

This survey ran concurrently with one I found much easier: the results of the annual ‘Read 50/100 books challenge’, which I enthusiastically engaged in for a few years before throwing in the towel after reaching 49 and finding myself both annoyed and embarrassed that I should care. It’s not like when I was a kid taking part in the Pizza Hut sponsored reading programme when I was rewarded every month with a free personal pan pizza for something I was going to do anyway. I was also motivated to give up during a conversation with our friend, the late Martin Skidmore, when he noted that while he was proud to have accomplished his target of 100 books, he also admitted that he found it had become a frustrating slog that took some of the joy out of reading. Instead of choosing books based on recommendations, or a really enticing review, or what he just fancied reading at any given time, he was prioritising what he could read in a week or less to hit his target. So, I stopped keeping track of the books I read and, having gradually left social media platforms over the last decade or so, haven’t been writing about them either.

But I’ve found that keeping track is genuinely useful. Not to browbreat or reward myself for surpassing a set number, since I am a grown-ass human with my own shoes and money and good friends too (though if someone wants to give me pizza for reading, I’d be overjoyed), but because I love reading more than just about anything else (plus ça change!), and I want to rave about my faves and get recommendations. Unfortunately, due in no small part to being cast in the long-running horror show Peri: The Pausening, when asked, I have been blanking on everything apart from the last four or five books I’ve read.

I found last year’s list very useful for giving and receiving recommendations, and as I’ve recently joined Blue Sky, I have compiled this shortlist so I can signal boost my favourites. No marks awarded, and categories are provided simply to group themes.

Fiction – To Get Proper Stuck Into
The Fraud – Zadie Smith
I got lost right away in this excellent historical fiction, ostensibly about William Ainsworth and his bonkers-level output, but mainly about Victorian colonialism, as narrated by Smith’s always brilliant characters; while they couldn’t be more different, you do care about everyone very much, even when they are being complete tools or painfully naive.

The Patriots – Sana Krasikov
Why must you compulsively parade your loyalty to whatever cruel and indifferent master happens at this moment to be pressing his boot on your neck? Florence Fein flees her stifling and conforming life in 1930s Brooklyn towards what she knows will be a better future for a Jewish woman in the progressive Soviet Union. Years later, her son Julian returns to Moscow for a cagey business deal and to reconnect with his son. The interconnecting flash-back and -forward storyline is compelling and, like The Fraud, is driven by the at-times maddening but always relatable characters.

Fiction – I Needed to Laugh
The Husbands – Holly Gramazio
Every single sentence in this book is a frigging delight. I ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and was roaring with laughter throughout. With an engaging time-bendy plot, a lovable protagonist and enough twists and turns to keep you guessing, you’d have to be the strictest of fun-haters not to enjoy it.

All Fours – Miranda July
If The Husbands was the book I wanted, All Fours was the book I needed. It takes a hard dive from the obvious and gives tiny little sucker-punches of poignancy between the self-aware hilarity. I sincerely hope this book either kick-starts or is part of a new era of perimenopausal coming-of-age narratives.

Fiction – I Wasn’t Expecting That
I’m a Fan – Sheena Patel
This was the first book I read in 2024 and one that I was thinking about for a long time afterwards. The short chapters reveal someone anchorless, drifting through a fine art world that keeps her at arm’s length due to her race and gender, and the novel reads like the anti-social media face we do everything in our power to avoid revealing. I raced through it, hoping to meet other who also read it to get their thoughts – which are very mixed.

The Book of Days – Francesca Key
We bow to those who dispose our lives, we who have no power. This book is a testament to why I find it difficult to put aside a book as DNF, because I really was not on board for the first chapter, but I persevered because it had come highly recommended. The king, Henry VIII, and his religious reformations don’t make much of an impact on day-to-day life, apart from general annoyance that certain saints, prayers, and candles are proscribed, although folk like Alice mostly ignore it and focus on general survival. This is such a slow book whose intensity is rolled out so smoothly, that by the time it reached the apex, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. If I had to pick one book out of this lot as my favourite, it would this one.

Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata
To say I read this book in a state of what can’t exactly be described as anxiety, but possibly high tension does not reflect my puzzled enjoyment. Keiko Furukura is a protagonist whom I felt a good deal of compassion towards, while at the same time I wondered if I was being emotionally exploited. In many ways this is my ideal narrative: the plot is somewhat tertiary to character development, and Keiko took me to places I was not expecting.

Fiction – Re-reads
Wyrd Sisters – Terry Pratchett
I usually re-read at least two Discworld books each year; Wyrd Sisters is probably the one I have read the most times. This book never fails to make me laugh but also revel in the world of Granny, Nanny and Magrat. If you haven’t read it in a while, I strongly recommend you do, and if you haven’t read it yet, it’s an excellent entry to the Discworld.

Paradise – AL Kennedy
A long time has passed since I first read this book, and it hit me in a totally different way this time around. I was far more able to appreciate the twisted humour in Hannah’s determination to self-annihilate while having more empathy for her constant stream of bad choices. And being AL Kennedy, the writing is fucking genius.

Fiction – By Writers Primarily Publishing As Poets
The Night Alphabet – Joelle Taylor
The stories-within-a-story are sometimes pretty bleak and hard-going, and as such it took me a lot longer to read this book because I had to take breaks from it. I would note there are a lot of content warnings, so it’s not for everyone, and in other circumstances I’d have not been able to finish it. But Joelle Taylor’s writing conveys such profound beauty in the face of brutality that despite everything, there is an overriding message of hope.

The Lodgers – Holly Pester
This book completely changed how I feel about the second-person POV. It is deployed perfectly here, with short chapters that, as in I’m a Fan, are laser-focused, intensive bursts of prose.

Poetry
Signs, Music – Raymond Antrobus
I am not naturally drawn to poetry or prose with a parent-driven narrative, but the exception is this excellent sequence that examines selfhood in relation to family, community, place and history. I found myself lingering on enjambed sentences, returning again and again to drink in the images and sounds.

Two Dying Lovers Holding a Cat – Luís Costa
I discovered queer publisher Fourteen Poems when taking part in a number of bi+ workshops last year and bought this pamphlet based on the title and cover image, and I was not disappointed. At turns rich in sensory detail and unflinching emotional starkness, I found myself blinking back tears more than once.

Non-Fiction
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World – Naomi Klein
Oh Naomi, I wish you did not have to listen to hundreds of hours of Steve Bannon’s podcast to write this book, but I do appreciate it. As much as there is to be depressed about, approaching the increasing polarisation of society with the framework of a ‘mirror world’ examines this madness with a measure of pragmatism and self-compassion.

SPQR – Mary Beard
Having spent nearly a quarter of this year watching, thinking, and writing about I, Claudius, a holiday to Rome was inevitable, and reading this compendium of decades of scholarly research was always going to be in the cards. Like Mary Beard’s BBC programmes, SPQR is both engrossing and meticulous but also warm, accessible and quite often very funny.

Livia: First Lady of Imperial Rome – Anthony A Barrett
As much as I loved Siân Phillips’s portrayal of Livia Drusilla as a scheming, evil genius, I couldn’t leave her story alone, and this biography puts most of this villainy to pasture. Structured in two parts, with the first being a straightforward chronological narrative and the latter an examination of the societal context for her position and personal/family relationships, it’s a good mix of academic analysis of Tacitus, Livy, etc. and genuine personal enthusiasm for setting the record straight.

Have you read any of these, and if so, what did you think? Also, hit me up with some recommendations for 2025 :)

Timetable is on the map, also below, will update on the day if it changes…

3pm The Vault 1895
4pm The Anchor Tap
4.45pm The Dean Swift
5.30pm The Kings Arms
6.30pm The Pommelers Rest
7.15pm The Two Bridges
8pm The Raven

Invite who you want, come when you like (though the timings are—as ever—sketchy). All are welcome. Bring friends, lovers, and acquaintances we’d love to see you all.

So what happened this year? A single year’s data isn’t likely to change the picture much – there’s signs the decline of the classic 70s UK Christmas tunes (“Glam Christmas”) has stabilised a bit but the overall trends remain in place. It’s probably more useful to look at specific winners and losers across the 2020s so far. So I’ve looked at my big Christmas spreadsheet to identify the songs that are at a 5-year high and a 5-year low in terms of Chart position. NB: This is just looking at the “official” Christmas chart – the final one before Christmas; some of these songs may have higher peaks in the run-in, if so I haven’t counted them.

HO HO HO

These songs are at a 5-year high in the Christmas charts.

#1. WHAM – “Last Christmas”: Well, duh. Overtook Mariah as the UK’s most popular Christmas song in 2021 and with Ladbaby out of the way has the field to itself. Easy to see it being No.1 every year for a while; also easy to see some behind the scenes maneuverings to keep the Charts’ biggest media event of the year interesting (for some value of interesting).

#6. BRENDA LEE – “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” / #8. BOBBY HELMS – “Jingle Bell Rock”: The big beneficiaries of the globalisation of Christmas playlists and the swing towards the old-time US Christmas canon being incorporated into British Christmas music. What’s interesting to me is the emphasis here on rock’n’roll – really not a style of music that gets played any other time of year – over the crooners, who have gained some ground but are also having to fight it out with Michael Buble and other modern covers. Lee and Helms were both kids recording Christmas songs, so there’s something perky and innocent as well as upbeat about the tracks which I’d guess is striking a chord here.

#9. ARIANA GRANDE – “Santa Tell Me” / 11. KELLY CLARKSON – “Underneath The Tree”: As we’ll see when we get to the losers, one thing that might be happening is a sorting of the 2010s modern Christmas regulars into those with genuine staying power and ones wearing out their welcome. Current popularity isn’t a brilliant guide to this – Grande is still a big name but I’m not sure Clarkson is (though her song has the benefit of being very good in a “we-have-Mariah-at-home” way).

#18. PAUL MCCARTNEY – “Wonderful Christmastime”: Elton still outstreams him but Macca’s weird, divisive synth banger is at a current high, whereas Elton has slipped a bit since the start of the 20s. I think its oddness, and the fact people have opinions on it, is doing it no harm at all.

#21. JOSE FELICIANO – “Feliz Navidad”: One of the most obvious beneficiaries of the Americanisation of the charts, “Feliz Navidad” was largely unknown here a decade ago and it’s been gaining in the charts every year. I think it’s a great addition to the UK canon, to be honest, and I’m happy for it to stick around a bit.

#22. THE RONETTES – “Sleigh Ride”: A couple of other tracks from the Spector Christmas Album have popped up in the charts but “Sleigh Ride” seems to be the one playlisters have settled on as the representative of the rest – Darlene Love fell back a bit this year. Combines American kitsch with the rock’n’roll sound that makes Lee and Helms appealing, so you can see why it’s the choice.

#23. SIA – “Snowman”: One of the subplots of the 2020s Christmas charts has been which Sia track is going to be “the one” – back in 2020 “Santa’s Coming For Us” led her pack but “Snowman” has risen every year and has triumphed – FOR NOW. I have very few opinions about Sia.

#51. JOHN WILLIAMS – “Carol Of The Bells”: It’s the one from Home Alone, obviously. Too low down to really bother with as a Christmas winner except! It only charted for the first time last year in the low 90s, and it’s jumped 40 places this time, so this is here as a watch-out in future. Movie soundtrack Christmas pop is a bit untapped and as playlisters look to shake things up a little “Carol” might well feature more heavily.

Now for the fun part, what’s on the way down or out?

NO NO NO

Tracks at a 5-year low in the Christmas charts.

#17. MICHAEL BUBLE – “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas”. It’s been in the Top 10 at Christmas as recently as 2021, but this steady performer fell back sharply this year. My fingers are crossed that this isn’t a fluke, and that Brenda and Bobby are opening the door for some old school recordings of the songs Buble has trailed smarm all over.

#25. CHRIS REA – “Driving Home For Christmas”: Fell out of the Top 20 in 2022 and has kept sliding, probably because it’s a terrible dirge. Other 80s stuff is holding up, by and large, so this is just a personal affront to the Balearic legend.

#28. WIZZARD – “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day”: Emblematic of the continued fall from grace of 70s Glamsters, though Slade has rallied a bit and Macca is doing fine (see above). Clinging on to a Top 30 slot, at any rate.

#33. ED SHEERAN & ELTON JOHN – “Merry Christmas”: Released in 2021 and was in the Top 5 for three years, making it the 2020s track that looked most likely to become a standard. Not so! This is a big drop, surely down to it cycling out of (or much lower down in) playlists, as Ed’s fortunes haven’t declined that much [EDIT: I forgot that downweightibg kicks in three years after release, putting Ed and Elt on the same playing field as any other oldie, which explains the collapse]. Anyway, I can’t say I’m sad about it.

#36. LEONA LEWIS – “One More Sleep”: Ariana and Kelly have prospered this decade but Leona Lewis has been sliding in the wrong direction for a few years; in 2020 all three were in the Top 20, but a tiering of last decade’s tracks is certainly in progress. Lower profile could also be a factor, of course.

#53: JUSTIN BIEBER – “Mistletoe”: It’s hung around the lower end of the Christmas chart all decade while more recent Bieber festivities have bothered us and departed, but it fell out of the Christmas Top 40 and it’s hard (for me at least) to imagine a revival of this very forgettable tune.

#59: COLDPLAY – “Christmas Lights”: One of the few recent ‘rock bands’ to try a Christmas song – though this being Coldplay it’s not a party belter. Descending swiftly towards the Greg Lake Zone.

#86: FRANK SINATRA – “Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow”: The division of Rat Pack spoils is stark this year – Dino’s “Let It Snow” has comprehensively won this battle and is warmly ensconced in the Top 30, Sinatra has to make do with a couple of Top 100 scraps.

#92: KELLY CLARKSON & ARIANA GRANDE – “Santa Can’t You Wait”: The singers of the two most popular modern Christmas songs team up – sounds like a winner? And until this year it was climbing year on year, before plunging from #27 last year to #92 now. A Christmas mystery! [EDIT: As with Ed and Elton, the three year downweighting cliff has taken its toll]. I can’t remember anything about it, so perhaps not a great loss.

#93: MICHAEL JACKSON & THE JACKSON FIVE – “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”: Another dramatic plunge after hanging around all decade just outside the Top 40. I doubt the difference between 50 and 90 is that meaningful, though.

And finally four songs which have been in every Top 100 so far this decade until now!

OUT: KYLIE MINOGUE – “Santa Baby”: Has fallen out of favour compared to other covers (Laufey has one this year) and the Eartha Kitt original.

OUT: BING CROSBY – “White Christmas”: This is a surprise – a very steady performer, in the 50s every other year and on course to do the same last week. No idea what happened there.

OUT: THE PRETENDERS – “2000 Miles”: Even in its heyday this was a bit of a “second half of Disc 2 of the Now Christmas CD” makeweight but as with Bing it’s a fairly sudden removal and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it back.

OUT: MUD – “Lonely This Christmas”: Mud have the general 70s decline as a further headwind, as 20th Century Christmas No.1s That Are Actually About Christmas go only Cliff’s pair feel less suited for a revival. (Dickie Valentine’s people should be having a word with the playlisters, quite frankly).

And that’s how things stand this Christmas. The most striking thing for me are the falls of the two solidly successful 2021 tracks (Ed & Elton and Kelly & Ariane) now downweighting has kicked in – suggests that after the early-10s wave of attempts to write modern Christmas standards we’re back in a holding pattern, and one that streaming makes even harder to break.

This is not my best-loved time of year: it’s cold, dark and tainted by too many unhappy holiday memories. All the decorations remind me of when I was very young, and how I dreaded the annual construction of our plastic fir tree, anticipating my dad’s inevitable meltdown when one of the old-skool style lights burned out, and he ‘had’ to find and replace it (

So I can’t help but associate the fag-end of the calendar year with forced jollity and unacknowledged mourning. When every day is painfully shorter than the last, the urge to hibernate is strong, but that’s not an option, so I’ve prescribed myself a SAD lamp and a soundtrack of reassuring tunes. Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fungus is exactly the kind of instrumental comfort blanket I’m looking for right now. Personnel is very foundational-Mars Volta-adjacent, with Omar Rodríguez-López on most instruments, Blake Fleming and Marcel Rodríguez-López on drums / percussion, and in addition to house saxophonist Adrián Terrazas-González, Sara Christina Gross beefs up the woodwind corner.

Although strictly not a memorial, Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fungus is something of a love letter to the late Jeremy Ward. While he didn’t contribute his sound manipulation / engineering skills to this album, he was present at the recording. The cover features his photo, though I am not sure if that is somewhere in the texture of the black square that I’m not able to see digitally; regardless the artwork is obviously funereal. But the music itself is a life-affirming three-quarters of an hour of delightful shred capably supported with noodly sax that never becomes too shrill or overwhelming and some of the dopest drumming this side of Jon Theodore.

Contemporaneous reviews tended to be positive, with a few grumbles about random samples and effect choices on “Mood Swings” and “Seeth Of Cloudless Hymstone”; personally I found that for the most part, these moments were deployed to good effect and never became overwhelming. I also really enjoyed a full tracklist of the kind of titles that scream Volta. And indeed, the opening track “Hands Tied to the Roots of a Hemorrhage” later appeared as the middle section of “Eriatarka” from De-loused in the Comatorium. This version, while a full-on tasty jam and my favourite way to start an ORL joint, is just as intense but not quite as compressed. “City Dreams Inside a Truck” is a pulsing link between the thrash of the two songs it sits between. For such a short interlude, it still interjects a growling menace.

I first heard “Sex, Consolation For Misery” via the Telesterion compilation and immediately awarded 10 out of 10 for the kind of title that is both funny and also incredibly sad, but mainly quite funny. From the very first note, a story is told of resigned desolation. Despite being a tight four and a half minutes, the jam is given space to ponder itself, somewhat pompously, through shivery reverb that lends a kind of drunken twanginess. It’s a slower jam, but not a slow song, with repetition that knows when to step aside. It’s also one of the sax-free tracks, and while I’m not totally averse, and my tolerance for the squeakfest on The Bedlam in Goliath notwithstanding, this definitely lent weight to my selection of it as a featured track.

I’m always searching for the narrative in songs, even when there are no lyrics, and the title “A Story Teeth Rotted For” would appear to lend credence to this practice. This song would heavily inspire “Teflon” from Octahedron, which is pretty obvious in the melody, although this version lacks the dense claustrophobia heard on that iteration, although it is no less haunting. And yet, the spacey effects and slant-dischord inject a kind of clarifying air: vast and cold, but also beautiful. It’s no surprise this was the template for what became a song whose lyrics considered the horror of a potential McCain administration. While that now seems positively quaint, Cedric’s warning is more apt than ever (the dates, they change with each new phase / I’m anxious bouts of nervous…one driver in your motorcade / is all it takes / is all it takes).

Further Mars Volta inspiration appears on “Tied Prom Digs on the Docks”, elements of which would be used on the extended instrumental section of Frances the Mute, in particular the taffy-stretched wibbly parts of “Cassandra Gemini”. There are similar explosions of quiet-loud-quiet, with some intense drumming and a boiling-frog buildup of sax that pushes me to my limits and ends right on time. And while I know as much about jazz as I do country or electronic (or anything that isn’t pop that makes me grin or rock that makes me giddy), this is the kind of loungey, accessible fun I can get behind. Lately, my go-to reaction gif has been Louis Balfour taking a drag off his weedy roll-up and mouthing ‘nice’, and that, too, seems to fit the vibe: earnest people playing music for sheer delight. Even the weird, distorted background dialogue is nested in the layers deep enough not to intrude and blends in as an instrument, as it did on Old Money. The result is an underlying scratchiness under the jazzy smoothness that puts me in mind of savoury ice cream; on paper it shouldn’t work, but in reality, some kind of flavour magic is scrambling my brain.

Even the lopsided weirdness of proto-sea shanty “Of Ankles to Stone” and its clutch of pass-agg effects petering out to a whoompy squeak just plain make sense for this record. Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fungus has all I could ask for: Mars Volta easter eggs, a saxophone experience that keeps a lid on the shriller explosions, and enough shred to keep me engaged. During a time when I can’t control much, and after a long year of dread, I’ve had this record on high rotation, second only to Old Money itself, and considering that OM is the OG, this is no mean feat. 

Track listing:
Hands Tied to the Roots of a Hemorrhage
City Dreams Inside a Truck
Sex, Consolation for Misery
Tied Prom Digs on the Docks
Seeth of Cloudless Hymstone
Mood Swings
An Ancient Shrewdness in the Veins
A Story Teeth Rotted For
Of Ankles to Stone

60. PUBLIC ENEMY – “By The Time I Get To Arizona” (1991)

I learned too late that this record is NOT in fact a single, despite having an (incendiary) video made for it, it was a B-Side. But that’s OK! Because apparently an album tracks challenge is planned and this apocalyptic heavy funk curse on the state of Arizona can get its due in that.

59. PULP – “Razzmatazz” (1992)

At the end of the 90s, “Common People” topped my list of the decade’s 100 best songs, but I didn’t really consider it for this challenge. The truth is that I’m kind of discoursed-out on that song, though it was good to see some people grapple with it in interesting ways over the course of the UncoolTwo50 and it’s still, obviously, an excellent record (I dropped it at the penultimate filtering). I’m more drawn to Pulp’s cusp-of-breakthrough songs, the weird, itchy, sweaty, black-hearted things they collected on the Pulpintro LP. “Razzmatazz” was the first thing I heard by them – a friend bought it and it sounded mysterious and seedy; it does the thing Pulp did on “Common People” too, a song of crushing, judgemental scorn about a woman with a furious, spiteful chorus. I think “Razzmatazz” feels less justifiable and excusable than the class animus in “Common People” but perhaps that’s more honest – we can’t always come up with very good reasons to despise people.

Anyway then I decided I didn’t want any Britpop bar a late Auteurs single, so out it went. 

58. DE’LACY – “Hideaway (Deep Dish Radio Mix)” (1995)

Another late cut, as it actually was in the first Uncool50 event – poor “Hideaway” can’t catch a break. Deliciously crunchy drums on this soulful house track which felt like a cool breeze in a year when guitars were everywhere.

57. THE MAGNETIC FIELDS – “100,000 Fireflies” (1991)

I love The Magnetic Fields and this was a touchstone single of my early 20s, full of brutal lines about romantic misery during a time when things in my own life were pretty difficult. I still love it, and I still feel far too close to it. Its skeletal, trebly sound ended up just not fitting the vibe of the final list so I dropped it.

56. MAN 2 MAN MEETS MAN PARRISH – “Male Stripper” (1986)

As I said in my thread for the No.1 song in my list, the AIDS epidemic is the black hole at the centre of the 1977-1999 era’s music, a scourge which cut to the heart of the communities who made some of the most vital and beautiful music of the time, but who would and could certainly have made more. The death of youth from AIDS haunts the pop culture of the 80s like the death of youth in war haunts the 60s. In the video of “Male Stripper”, a gorgeously silly, matter-of-fact Hi-NRG song about sex work, money and desire, you can see how thin and ill Miki Zone looks; he died of AIDS-related diseases at the end of 1986, months before his song became a huge hit in the UK and his surviving brother Paul Zone got to perform it alone on Top Of The Pops. None of which changes how much life there is in the song’s bare-wired, irresistible groove.

55. MADONNA – “Burning Up” (1983)

Three songs now by acts who got a single into my Top 50 – as the years go by it’s Madonna’s earliest records I keep coming back to, the hungry NYC disco tracks by a star on a scene, not global level. “Burning Up” is almost her best single, a disco-rock hustle which matches its title and makes promises she will keep: “I’m not the same / I have no shame”

54. PRINCE AND THE REVOLUTION – “Kiss” (1986)

Of the Prince “big” singles this is the one I was most drawn to this time, for its compact effectiveness – just a guitar figure and a beat, a modernist version of something Bo Diddley would have understood immediately 30 years before.

53. THE ORB – “Blue Room” (1992)

I came so close to just saying “fuck it” and putting the 40-minute Blue Room in, and my pick of “Little Fluffy Clouds” was as much tactical as sentimental in the end. Not a ‘single’ in any truly meaningful sense of the term, and indeed released just to fuck with the technical definitions imposed by the Official Charts Company (it lasts 39 minutes and 59 seconds). But it’s also The Orb at their most imperial-phase maximalist, a wonderful dub techno composition from a time when nobody was putting deep basslines and wibbly-wobbly noises together with as much gusto. A masterpiece and a piss-take: very them.

52. NEW ORDER – “Regret” (1993)

The kings and queen of the first Uncool50 run had a trickier time with vote-splitting this time, with their (far inferior, I’m saying) Joy Division incarnation running away with a lot of the points. For me the two bands tell a single story of almost continuous improvement, and it properly ends with the redemptive, triumphant populism of 1990’s Number 1 “World In Motion”. “Regret” is a beautiful coda, maybe their best actual, you know, song and Barney even seems to have made some effort with his lyrics. Luckily they never released anything else after it.

51. FATIMA MANSIONS – “Blues For Ceaucescu” (1990)

My “Song 51”, the track I’d most like to have found room for, is this howl of punky/grungy/indie/just plain wrathful rock, the late Cathal Coughlan pulling the temple of the British establishment down around him, damning not just the freshly-dead Romanian dictator but the corrupt West patting themselves on the back for their Cold War victories, as he imagines Ceaucescu born again in the bosom of the great and good. A splenetic, raging grind from the nightmare zone the Mansions evoked (or possibly prophesied).

Events overtook me – they overtook everyone – and two weeks ago, when I posted this song to Bluesky, seems a very long time indeed. I’ll try to reconstruct this ancient era.

When I think about 80s French pop I think of M. Le Moigne, my French teacher for a year or so after I’d taken my O-Level, got a B, and was stuck doing French for a couple of terms longer because they couldn’t find anything else to take its spot on the syllabus. Le Moigne was a soixante-huitard who used to set us documents from the era, sit us down to watch classic French cinema like Le Trou and Le Salaire de la Peur, and got us struggling through Candide. He was one of the best teachers I ever had. He could easily be diverted onto tales of the barricades, he (inevitably) smoked endless gauloises, and he would also sometimes play us his favourite French rock music, which I’m sorry to say we mocked.

Mylene Farmer wasn’t one of the artists he liked, but the intense theatricality of “Libertine” – best experienced in an 11-minute video which would have cost the guy his job if he’d showed it to us – takes me back to that summer and my crash course in Francophone culture. It is French beyond the schoolboy dreams of Frenchness, involving 18th century duels, naked women in a bath, the howling of wolves, and a very symbolic horse. It’s also a wonderful piece of synthpop, with the characteristic flimsiness of French 80s production working particularly well with Farmer’s very breathy voice.

22. KATE BUSH – “Hounds Of Love” (1986)

In one way very similar in vibe to “Libertine” – you can imagine Mylene Farmer’s collaborator/director champing at the bit to get at this one – in another… well, just listen to those drums smash in after “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” and know you’re in the presence of someone who is not fannying around, productionwise. Everyone who’s written this up for the challenge has talked about the terrifying, amazing feeling of falling in love, me included, and yes that is what the song is about. But it’s also my favourite Kate Bush song because of its deep connection to landscape and nature – the trees, the lake, the fox. It’s the most English of songs, bringing the rolling countryside of Southern England, where I’ve lived all my life, unavoidably to my mind.

21. FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD – “Two Tribes” (1984)

This was the pick originally scheduled for November 5th, I dropped it back a bit and I’m glad I did. The thing about nuclear war and the 80s is that it was mostly truly terrifying but it was in some tiny reptilian part of the brain also darkly exciting – not in the shitty survivalist Twilight 2000 sense of imagining you personally might end up as a post-apocalyptic warlord but in the “inner Doctor Strangelove” sense of the sheer scale of everything you had ever known ending all at once. Frankie Goes To Hollywood understood this when they recast armageddon as something you could dance to, synthesised basslines and high-NRG keyboards pushing into the red as Holly Johnson drops a series of extraordinary one-liner slogans.

These days I am rather less keen on that death-urge, though we’re reminded day in, day out how strongly it still exists.

20. GETO BOYS – “Mind Playin’ Tricks On Me” (1991)

One of rap’s darkest, most dread-laden songs – not the horrorcore gothic grand guignol of someone like Gravediggaz, but true, clammy paranoia. I read about it before I heard it, in a Greil Marcus book, talking about how the mysterious “lawman” (which I always heard as “ol’ man”) in Bushwick Bill’s song is an avatar of Stagger Lee and Satan. Not much doubt about the latter – Bill’s verse is a grade-A ghost story told in a minute, with an ending that flips the situation into something even less comfortable than a meeting with the devil, who you can after all bargain with. As the years have gone by I’ve learned to love the other verses to the song as much – more subtle but just as chilling narratives of minds on the edge of a breakdown.

19. TAFFY – “I Love My Radio” (1986)

One thing I noticed doing the sorting and filtering for this challenge was how often I was turning to the most upfront, trashy tunes of my youth, like Taffy, which if you’re being flattering you could say is Italo disco (she’s from Deptford but the song came out on an Italian label and was a hit there first). But you could just as easily describe it as holiday pop, the soundtrack to pissed-up nights in Meditteranean nightclubs, brought home as a souvenir. As I pointed out at one point on Popular that’s also the story of acid house and Balearic Beat; it’s just a question of the lens you look at this stuff through.

There’s a few reasons I’m drawn to songs like this at the moment, good and bad. On the good side I like its unpretentious immediacy – “I Love My Radio” is not trying to be anything other than a dancepop banger, a job it executes perfectly. On the bad side I suspect the prominence of this is a kind of decadent impulse – we’re considering a stretch of years I lived through, have thought about and returned to many times, and most recently polled a lot of on Twitter – no doubt I’m drawn to tackier pleasures to escape the burden of critical overthought.

If I really wanted to – and I don’t – I could fall down a rabbit hole reading various essays and blog posts about the death of the album. But for the sake of simplicity (and laziness), let’s say the first knell sounded shortly after the release of the first compact disc, due to the ability to play both sides without pause. And sure, eight-tracks also did that, but they also sucked too hard for mass adoption and did not appear to be much mourned; in fact, when I was a baby, I’m told my ma turned her back “for a second” and looked back to find me laughing maniacally and ripping reams of tape from the

I am old enough to have started off with vinyl records, then cassettes, and as such, grew up with a tangible delineation between sides A and B. Although vinyl is making an impressive comeback – and I do welcome it for the revenue it brings artists – and despite buying key favourites – in all honesty I’m always going to spend my bell at Bandcamp and stream on Spotify instead. My music experience has been entirely digital for quite a while now, albeit a few years later than many people’s, and I can’t pretend I don’t enjoy the ease and convenience, as well as the cost-savings, but it’s made the death of the album very apparent. 

It’s no secret I’m something of a sideways poptimist, thankfully rescued from toxic rockism via a gaggle of chums who reminded me music is meant to be fun. And while it’s clear a deep seam of rockism features in my very foundation, Dua Lipa and Charli XCX feature prominently in my top ten 2024 records. And that’s the part of rockism that won’t die for me: I’m an albums-woman, firmly of the belief that you should play it through from start to finish or don’t bother. While I love a complex, multilayered concept, that’s just a glacé cherry on a sundae; what I expect is a coherent theme. Even if there isn’t an obvious unifying subject matter, sides A and side B were generally arranged in such a way that you noticed a kind of shift or continuation of a subtle vibe.

Doom Patrol is not such an album, although superficially, it might appear so. Some of the later tracks flow directly into one another and without any obvious change other than of song title, and it could very easily be mixed and edited as one long piece split into movements. But similarity does not equate to a connective, overall theme. 

Maybe because of this, Doom Patrol has not been on high rotation, which can be partly attributed to the fact that it was the last album to be released after two years of relentless back catalogue clearouts. It was a great time but also kind of overwhelming, and as such, I found very few reviews to compare my opinions with. But the main reason I haven’t listened much is that there’s no there there; the brief comment on Rate Your Music calling Doom Patrol “interesting…but with no discernible boundaries…too directionless to leave much of a lasting impression” sums it up succinctly. Before this project began, I may have listened two or three times and then kept putting off both listening and close-listening and therefore kicking the review-can down the road, meaning I’ve probably heard Despair more times than this. 

As is often the case with the 2016-17 tranche of Ipecac Recordings albums, a bit of light archeology unearths connections to previous albums: the Mars Volta wiki is excellent for parsing the guitar sample from Killing Lifting Tingled Retreat’s “Or Make War” that features here on “Chew, Devour”. Considering how much I wang on about lyrics, it’s pretty telling that I didn’t pick up on the fact that the lyrics to “Voraz”  are also heard on “Roman Lips”, and only realised it after reading the same Mars Volta wiki page. 

But I found it hard to pinpoint exactly what my beef is. The notes I made for “Chew, Devour” are broadly the same as they are for every other song: 

• plinky in a plodding, disinterested way
• vexingly familiar (that’ll be that sample)
• discordant echoes add confusing layers
• energy kicks up yet vocals drag their feet
• piano violation/penetration…and then it just sort of ends

The best I could do was to compare “Tight Mess Boys” with a jumper that’s both comfortable and fashionable but too covered with pills to be worn publicly, in a point I was trying to make about acceptable fuzziness. I also thought “Maggot Breath” sounded like all the instruments were having an argument and chatting bullshit over the top of one another. But these comments could easily apply to any song on the album.

It’s not even that this is a terrible record, in that the music isn’t bad, and certainly no one should feel bad. There’s quite a bit of groovy standup bass that filters through, as on “Circuitry of Team Rash”, but my notes for “In Case of Emergency, Die Slowly” just say like The Shitty Beatles (not just a clever name). I’ve no real desire to dunk on this, but that too is its own kind of burn. There is love – twisted, toxic love – but love nonetheless in a hatchet piece where the vitriol either comes from feeling let down by a favourite or the evil joy in trashing a hated target. Still, this is one record out of dozens and one of a handful I’ve no time for. Also, the titles absolutely whip, and one of them gives a question to the Jeopardy! answer “A three-word definition of fascism”. 

Track listing:
Chew, Devour
Tight Mess Boys
Maggot Breath
Cruelty Restores Order
Necroplasty
In Case of Emergency, Die Slowly
Washed Heel Flip
Voraz
Circuitry of Team Rash
Dressed for a Stabbing Museum

70. ORLANDO – “Just For A Second” (1996)

We’re now into the section of tracks which had a real, honest-to-goodness chance of actually making my list of 50, which is partly why I’m running them now the UncoolTwo50 challenge is well advanced and there’s no chance of me saying “WAIT! I’ve been a fool! What this challenge needs is an obscure Romo single!”. ROMANTIC MODERNISM (for it is they) was a failed attempt at a post-Britpop counterstrike, but it did give us this gloriously flouncy synthpop single, very much in the tradition of Soft Cell, or perhaps Morrissey fronting the Pet Shop Boys. Much of the backing sounds like it was two pounds fifty well spent, but the truly stylish man needs no expensive production to convince.

69. FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON – “Papua New Guinea” (1991)

Very much at the banging end of ambient dub techno, this has one of the best basslines of the 1990s and is a startling creation even for the explosively inventive hardcore era. The main thing holding me back was not quite being able to find a mix I liked – the single version is too truncated, the full 12” faffs around a little too much before getting to the sonar blips, Dead Can Dance siren calls, and breakbeat muscle that makes up the meat of it. (I’m also still a little put off by remembering what dickheads FSOL were about jungle in general a couple of years later).

68. DONNIE IRIS – “Ah! Leah” (1980)

Got to admit, I’m not a big power pop guy, but this track from the 1980 poll really won my heart. Partly it’s that it’s so chunky, over-the-top and sincere it feels like it must be from some kind of power pop equivalent of Spinal Tap, fire/desire rhymes and all.

67. GRACE JONES – “Private Life” (1980)

I sensed there would be some vote splitting for (ladies and gentlemen) Miss Grace Jones and I was right in my hunch that this pick would only add to it. But even if it’s not the most danceable or innovative of her singles, it’s the most beautifully forbidding. Jones takes Chrissie Hynde’s world-weary dismissal of some drama-addicted hanger-on (or friend or lover) and gives it an Emma Frost style diamond form. “I’m very superficial, I hate everything official”

66. EARTH WIND AND FIRE – “Fantasy” (1977)

There’s a bunch of disco high up on my list and it was sad to leave off this extraordinary prog-soul-disco tune, which feels like it’s descended to us from a wiser, more enlightened parallel 1970s. A sculpture of formidable beauty thanks to its nested choruses, both brilliant.

65. JAY-Z – “Big Pimpin” (1999)

Two more problematic contenders now. With a heavy heart I had to admit two things to myself. First, that this track is hands down my favourite Timbaland production of the period under consideration, a Wacky Races jalopy of a beat which guest stars Pimp C and Bun B in particular make their own. Second, that like Jay-Z himself I am now of an age where it is difficult for me to stand up and rep for “Big Pimpin’”

64. CUTTY RANKS – “Limb By Limb” (1993)

This was a tricky one – it was in my original Uncool50 and was in the new list too until quite late. It’s my favourite dancehall performance ever, full of brutal, mile-high swagger, and I really wanted something like it in the fifty. BUT. Googling it there’s a strong feeling among some writers that this is a song like Buju Banton’s “Boom Bye Bye”, calling for the murder of gay people. Now, “Boom Bye Bye” is explicit about that, to the extent that Discogs won’t let you trade it any more, and you can still sell “Limb By Limb”. I think the lyrics aren’t specific on this – I’d always heard the violence as metaphorical and directed at rival MCs, but that’s my luxury as a British genre tourist, and it’s very possible Ranks went on record as saying yes, it’s about gays. In the end I just wasn’t comfortable including it in the final list, so I dropped it partway through and put in “On A Ragga Tip” instead.

63. ACT – “Snobbery And Decay” (1987)

I don’t know whether it’s decadence of my own that’s made me come round to this opinion but dammit, this is better than any of the Propaganda singles. It’s funnier, it’s nastier, it’s got a better tune, its 12” remix (the definitive one, as usual) has some structure to it rather than being a collection of gorgeously expensive sounds. Not that the Propaganda singles are bad, heaven forbid, but this is Claudia Brucken’s finest moment.

62. NENEH CHERRY – “Manchild” (1989)

One of the frustrations in the original Uncool50 exercise was voting for this gorgeous, sad, empathic meditation on toxic masculinity (years before I’d met the idea, of course) and being the only person voting for it in the rush to pick “Buffalo Stance”. Which is great! But I love “Manchild” more. So this time I decided to take my ball back home and of course I’ve seen other people choose it.

61. WOMACK AND WOMACK – “Love Wars” (1984)

I regret a bit how little room I found for soul music on this list compared to the 1954-1976 challenge. This is one of the great soul singles of the UncoolTwo50 period, music that (like the also excellent “Teardrops”) came from a place which was just too grown-up for me to remotely get at the time. The ad libs and backing vocals on the chorus are what put this one in contention.

This feels, to me anyway, like my most idiosyncratic choice – a 1984 single that’s very very much in their “The Big Music” phase, which is neither an ethos or a sound I would say I have a lot of time for. Windswept Celtic pomp-rock – all my early life as a music fan trained me to take the piss out of this stuff, so it takes a song of particular force to break through my cynical reserve about chest-beating hollering passionate guys who have more than a few Van Morrison records (Kevin Rowland gets a lifetime pass, though).

Anyway this particular song hooked me by the sneaky method of starting with a reference to C.S.Lewis’ Narnia books, and not just any Narnia book, the second most controversial and first most mad one, The Last Battle (the most controversial one is controversial for being extra-racist, fortunately nobody’s making records about that) (I hope). “Bye bye Shadowlands! The term is over and all the holidays have begun!” yells Mike Scott, strongly implying that either he or us are all dead.

Further up and further in! The rest of the song is urgent jangle rock with a big horn section to give it some whoomp, the favoured trick of 1980-era Dexys and The Teardrop Explodes, so this is a late deployment of the sound but I’ve always liked it and still do. The song feels a bit like reading one of Pat Mills’ comics in that phase where it was all about the Goddess and the mysteries of Womankind: Mike Scott sings about sings about something personal and spiritual which could be Christian, could be pagan, could be highly individualised nature worship, while the horns blast away behind him. As this write-up shows I am not sure why I have listened to this song dozens of times, I like hearing guys connect with something that’s clearly real and True to them even if I can’t do it myself.

26. SCRITTI POLITTI – “Oh Patti (Don’t Feel Sorry For Loverboy)” (1988)

There was no question I would pick a Scritti Politti song. They’re the only band I’ve seen live more than once in the last 10 years, and it was actually the first of those times which guided my hand here. It was the first time they’d tried this song live – it has one major barrier to doing it (aside from whatever personal dislike Green may have of the Provision era, the only time he’s tried to repeat his last record’s formula) which is that Miles Davis plays the wistful trumpet solo. A few minutes’ work for Davis which both gives this gossamer record some depth and creates a tricky problem for the band. They had a guy on stage – from memory a young lad – whose job it was to be Miles for the night. He did very well, of course, and I was thrilled to have heard one of my favourite Scritti songs get its debut.

Beyond that it’s a sad record. “We tried together to discover how we failed the test of our times” speaks to me as a line more than it did even that night at the start of 2016. “I got so tired of concluding that there’s nothing for us to conclude”, on the other hand, is a Scritti-by-numbers line (though not a bad one) and a sign that the continental-philosophy-as-pop game might soon be up. I wish he’d stuck longer with his next brief phase, the ragga-pop covers of “She’s A Woman” and “Take Me In Your Arms And Love Me”, the second of which was almost a highly perverse pick here.

25. WIRE – “Outdoor Miner” (1978)

One of the oddest stories of the post-punk era is that EMI tried to buy this single into the charts and got caught, leading to a Top Of The Pops appearance being cancelled. How might the world have been different? Not appreciably, let’s be honest. But from another angle you can see why they did it – this is Wire’s prettiest single, one of the prettiest by any of the post-punk awkward squad, the flowering of that real gift for an attractive chord progression that shows up occasionally even at their most aggressive or abstruse.

As I delighted in pointing out when I nominated it for the World Cup Of Animals, it’s about a caterpillar (the Serpentine Leaf Miner, fact fans) and indeed boasts a density of beasts few songs can match. Leopard’s eyes (rhymed with jeopardise, chef’s kiss), lambs, silverfish, and the creature itself. Why did they write about this? I do not know. I find the lyrics completely inscrutable and extremely poignant. “In fact it’s the earth which he’s known since birth” – I feel you, little guy, even though I’m not sure why.

24. NEW RADICALS – “You Get What You Give” (1998)

This one is a pinch-hit, drafted into the list after Simple Minds’ grandiose “New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)” was eliminated due to only being a single in Italy. I wanted something which summed up an era for me as well as that does and which had the additional similarity of daring the listener to take it seriously.

“You Get What You Give” fits that bill. It’s an odd record, in that it says things about the late 90s now which it didn’t seem to at the time. On release its aggressive sincerity stuck out like a sore thumb in an alt-pop landscape which was still full of post-grunge wariness about saying too much of what you mean. “You Get” anticipates some of the heart-on-sleeve attitudes of 00s indie rock – your Arcade Fires and your Sufjan Stevenses. But those groups never did anything as anthemically pop as this song: it’s so funny that he calls out Hanson of all people, since “Mmmbop” is probably the only other contemporary hit that’s catchy and eager and naive in this particular way.

But the late 90s aren’t always remembered for being as cynical and ironic as they actually were: they are also mythologised now as a time of bright-eyed optimism, where fixing society and the world’s problems seemed possible. “You Get”’s calls to arms are ridiculous but they’re also bittersweet given… everything that happened this century, pretty much. It’s one of the few songs which actually lives up to that idea of the 90s as some kind of land of lost content, even though that’s a distortion of the lived truth of it. A richer text than Gregg Alexander probably intended, in other words. Courtney Love would still pulverise him, though.

It’s been heartening to see a lot of people picking this, though opinion has been fairly evenly split as to whether the original album cut or the Coldcut “7 Minutes Of Madness” remix is the one to go for. There’s little doubt the Coldcut version is a landmark, and I love a lot of the records which borrowed from it… but I also find myself wishing they’d worked their wacky magic on something else: “Paid In Full”, in its original form, is a perfect miniature, Eric B’s rambling intro and drawn out scratching at the end padding out a track which is one verse long and also exactly as long as it needs to be. A train of thought captured in rhymes and beats – there’s something so primally right about that when it’s done well, and it was rarely done better.

30. DEXYS’ MIDNIGHT RUNNERS – “Come On Eileen” (1982)

Each of Dexy’s three 1980-1985 albums produced one perfect single that sums up its era of the band. For their first LP it was “There, There My Dear” – Kevin Rowland spitting, clucking and yelping his fury out, drawing lines against the people who didn’t get it, reinforced by brassy muscle. For their third it was the 12” folly of “This Is What She’s Like”, the ineffable captured in strange sketch comedy, vocal babble, a tighter rocking band – oh, and he’s still not suffering any fools, even as he starts to admit he might be one. In between, though comes Too-Rye-Ay, their most sentimental and generous record, and it’s summed up by their biggest, best and corniest hit. I’ve written plenty in the past about “Come On Eileen” and its inclusiveness – the way it calls back to mums and dads at the same time as it puts a stake down for hungry youth. I’m at the stage now where it might as well be a Christmas song or a hymn, which is why it’s down this low in my ranking – there’s no surprises left in it, just the glow of good fellowship.

29. FANIA ALL-STARS – “Ella Fue (She Was The One)” (1977)

This is the first song from my original, chronological, Uncool50 – faced with the choice of punk or disco to represent 1977, I choose… salsa! This was a pick Jonathan Bogart made in the 1977 pop poll I ran, and perhaps my favourite ever poll discovery, a doorway into a world of music I’ve still only tentatively stepped into (it took me until this year to listen to Fania All-Stars’ excellent parent album, Rhythm Machine). “Ella Fue”, as its subtitle tells you, is a lovers’ song, a romantic song, one of many attempts musicians have made to capture human perfection in the language of rhythm and sound. It gets closer than most.

28. SOFT CELL – “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” (1982)

From probably the most generous, open-hearted track on the list, to almost certainly the most spiteful, the closing kiss-off to Soft Cell’s masterpiece first LP Non Stop Erotic Cabaret, and one of the most petty, cruel, and desperate break-up songs I’ve ever heard. Only Dylan’s “Idiot Wind” courses with as much self-hating bile, and “Idiot Wind” isn’t as good, or as abased, as this: it can’t help achieve a kind of paranoid epic quality, which is what the narrator of “Say Hello” thinks he’s getting to, when in fact he’s making the kind of public scene onlookers gasp at in embarrassed horror. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s heartbreaking because it’s so delusional – “a nice little housewife who’ll give me a steady life”, yeah right. Dave Ball, stoic in his pervert moustache, is the unsung hero here, coaxing more melodrama out of a 1981 synth than anyone else ever managed.

At the suggestion of Bluesky’s own Jel I have been allotting each song in my UncoolTwo50 list a BAGGY RATING, indicating how they align with the most important (to me) micro-scene of my teenage years. Baggy aka Madchester aka Indie-Dance is a weird little moment – a genuine vibe shift for British indie as groups suddenly discovered house, hip-hop and funk, but also one which flowered up (do you see) and flamed out very rapidly. One of the things people forget about Screamadelica – one of two indie-dance LPs which still has a solid critical rep – is that it came out extremely late, well after the party was finishing up, which might explain why Bobby Gillespie and company pivoted to rawk so quickly.

I said “suddenly” but it wasn’t sudden really. Happy Mondays had been making greasy, lairy sort-of-funk for five years before Pills’N’Thrills’N’Bellyaches (the other Good Baggy Album) and they were hardly the first Factory Records act to embrace the groove. Baggy is part of an indie-dance continuum as much as it is a singular movement, one which goes back to early 90s punk-funk and on to Britpop-era big beat remixes. There really has always been a dance element.

I liked “Step On” but pocket money triage meant I didn’t get the album, so I first heard “Kinky Afro” at the end of 1990 on John Peel’s Festive Fifty. Its overripe, saturated disco strings and the self-loathing sleaze of its lyrics jumped out at me as an immediate favourite, a song I rewound again and again. Maybe if I’d known more about its templates – “Lady Marmalade” most obviously – it would have made less of an impact. But I don’t think so. Pills’N’Thrills as an album feels decadent now, the Mondays cutting the sound of their first albums with something that makes it brighter but more brittle, a party going on too long. But even if I’d use Bummed first to try to convince someone the Mondays were good – not an easy job, in my experience – this album and this song still have my heart.

34. UTAH SAINTS – “Something Good” (1992)

I was faffing around as to whether to include this at all – big chart rave hits were a bit over-subscribed in my list, and also whenever I actually played it “Something Good” sounded less.. thrill-powered than I remembered. Something was missing. Then I realised I was playing the full length version. There’s a difference between rave music and, say, disco, where in general you need the 12” to get the full effect. Because the pleasures of rave singles are so immediate and frenzied, it’s often worth chasing down the single edit to get them in compressed form. That’s certainly the case with “Something Good”: on the long version the Kate Bush sample shows up every minute or so, in the edit it just repeats, an omnipresent ecstatic moan. The different house piano hooks come at you with pulse-pounding rapidity on the 7”. And most important of all, you only get the dude yelling “Utah Saints! U-U-U-Utah Saints!” on the short version, and if he’s not there what even is the point of the thing?

33. SAINT ETIENNE – “He’s On The Phone” (1995)

Obviously they kept making good singles after 1995 but Saint Etienne’s records kept turning up at particular moments in my University life, from Avenue coming out just after I arrived to this song’s release a few months after I left, with So Tough, the Xmas 93 EP, “Pale Movie” all coming out just in time to be on my walkman during particularly wonderful or disastrous times. So while I’ve liked them ever since, I think of them as my student band, and that partly guided my pick. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” is more important, and maybe more accomplished, but it wasn’t part of my emotional life in the way “He’s On The Phone” was, at the end of a wonderful summer.

The lyrics of “He’s On The Phone” do what Saint Etienne often do well; a song that hints at and evokes a situation without telling anything as specific as a story. A bittersweet vignette. Etienne Daho’s murmured appearance only adds to the mystique. The music, on the other hand, is startlingly direct for them – one of their most upbeat, club-ready pop singles, a boshing handbag/europop crossover in a style I rather wish they’d tried more often. 

32. FRANKIE SMITH – “Double Dutch Bus” (1980)

Goofy, affable funk songwriter Smith looks around late 70s New York and mixes three of its fads and pastimes for a novelty smash hit. There’s “-izzo” cant, double-dutch jump rope, and, in the wake of hits for the Sugarhill Gang and Curtis Blow, there’s rapping. The guy isn’t a technically brilliant rapper – he has the same very basic flow a lot of Brits will pick up on for their early-80s novelty records (“Wham! Rap” and Captain Sensible’s “Wot”) – but it does the job, and at the moment of writing I love “Double Dutch Bus” more than any other early hip-hop track because it’s a silly funk record which happens to use rapping alongside a bunch of other things Smith has found lying around. 

Rap took over the planet because it works in such a huge range of contexts, and “Double Dutch Bus” more than most 1980 records shows that, an old dude slipping smoothly in and out of the style and proving how flexible and fun it is. And it is! It starts “Gimme a HO if you want that funky BUS FARE!” before Frankie loses his fare, has to walk, grumbles about it, croaks like a frog, back-talks and gives Missy Elliott the bones of one of the greatest singles of the next century just for good measure.

I think the mystique of the KLF had probably gone about as far as it could – once you have a full length book treating the group as essentially a magical working you’re running out of road. The release of the group’s back catalogue to streaming helps bring things down to earth, lets us hear the band in the context of other pop thinkers and chancers of their era, from the Pet Shop Boys to Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

And also in the context that probably suits them best – banging Europop. As I argued when I wrote about the KLF for One Week One Band, secret ingredients Ricardo Da Force and the choirs of Mu Mu are what makes the ‘Stadium House Trilogy’ feel like Britain’s great contribution to 90s nonsense Europop, less a strange branch on the tree of the Illuminati and more the local equivalent of Culture Beat.

Obviously the genius of “Last Train” is that they’re both at once – it’s just (‘just’) another transcendent rave banger from an age of widescreen, Dad-baffling pop; and it’s also just another text in the codex of KLF self-references. Is the soaring riff what makes the song magical? It is. Does it make it more so if you recognise it from a load of other KLF records? Yeah, kind of. Building trails from the same breadcrumbs, again and again, until they got bored and drew a line: we will not see their like again.

38. CAMEO – “Word Up” (1986)

The apotheosis of mid-80s pop funk, the dry kick of the drums bouncing around an environment in which everything else is rubber. You could get a whole Hanna-Barbera season out of what Larry Blackmon is doing with his voice here, though they might balk at the costume. With no access to videos, I thought for years that Blackmon’s red codpiece on Top Of The Pops was a special treat for the British listeners. In my experience the playground-talk-the-next-day aspect of TOTP (and Doctor Who, for that matter) gets hyped up a bit. There was plenty of chat about pop, wise pronouncements as to the real subjects of certain songs, envy of people who’d seen ‘banned’ videos, and the usual set of homophobic pumped stomach and removed rib rumours that got passed down with each new set of performers. But actual “did you see that?” discussion? Not so much. The two exceptions I can remember most were Nena showing her armpit hair and Cameo’s codpiece. It made an impression.

37. RAZORCUTS – “Sorry To Embarrass You” (1986)

No codpieces here, with this piece of indiepop standing in for a genre I devoted a bit of time to in the white heat of my Smiths love era, 1988-1989. I never explored too far beneath the surface – I only owned one measly Sarah Records 7” – but most of my 16th year on this planet was spent with the conviction that the best music in the world involved jangly guitars and lyrics by sad men about being fated to misery.

This is not the case. I diversified pretty quickly, though it was a long time before I came to think of Morrissey as a basically malign influence, valorising self-pity in unhelpful ways given that I was a shy, self-righteous kid who probably should have just got over himself and engaged with the world a bit instead of sit on the sidelines grumbling at it. Not that a good old moan can’t be therapeutic, and for years afterwards I found indie a comforting listen when my emotions had dealt me a bad hand.

But for this exercise this Razorcuts song had a definite advantage, in that I only heard it for the first time in 2003, when someone posted it to I Love Music. It’s a song I could imagine identifying with intensely if I had heard it back in the late 80s (or – as was usually the case – I would spin my own circumstances in ways that fit the song I liked). But I’d built up an immunity by 2003, so I never actually did relate to it. I just enjoyed it as a great example of the style.

“But,” I hear you say, “it’s borderline incompetent”. Well, I guess it is. The band has a very uneasy relationship with tempo, and the singer makes Morrissey sound like Henry Rollins. Those things don’t matter. The point of this genre is to capture a feeling as directly as possible, and you work through your technical limitations to do it. Back in the day – as a reaction against the highly produced pop that Razorcuts et al co-existed with – there was a tendency for people to mistake the technical limitations for virtues in their own right, but I don’t think “Sorry To Embarrass You” is doing anything terribly different from a Scritti Politti or Shirelles song – all of them finding the best way to capture and express a sentiment.

One reason I like the song is that it gets at something left implicit in most indie – “Sorry To Embarrass You” is explicitly a song about class, about the bruises left by an attempt to pass and fit in to a different social world, and the way class in particular, and a bad relationship in general, can sap someone’s identity. Even Jarvis Cocker, who sang about this stuff a lot, never wrote anything as perfectly bitter as Razorcuts’ concluding thought: “I can hear your voice in every word that I say”. For a long time, that’s how I felt about indie itself, so perhaps I do relate after all.

36. PM DAWN – “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” (1991)

I did not know a lot of things about this record. I did not know that it was a hit in the UK first and then it got a release in the US and became the first Black hip-hop act to get a No 1 there (a claim I also did not know). I did know that Prince Be insulted KRS-One and got shoved off a stage by him, but I did not know that this incident basically didn’t hurt PM Dawn’s career much and they kept on having hits. A strange group! Heavy-lidded hippie mysticism felt like a natural progression from De La Soul, but De La themselves turned their back on the DAISY Age concept, leaving PM Dawn as floaty, tie-dyed outliers.

Decades later this seems mostly a footnote, but I think their mumbled rapping has worn very well. “Set Adrift”’s luxurious bubblebath production settled next to my token indiepop track in the ranking for a reason; there’s no musical similarity but they’re both essentially diffident songs, sensitive guys looking back on where things might have gone wrong. Where Razorcuts are bitter, Prince Be has a zen acceptance that some things just aren’t meant to be. The best moment in the song for me is still the “I wanted her to be a big PM Dawn fan” bit – a brag that ends up in a sigh and a shrug.

One of the best singles artists of the early 80s – “Fireworks”, “Melt”, “Slowdive”, “Swimming Horses”, “Spellbound”. Like a lot of great singles runs it’s a band finding a sound that’s their own and then working through it with fairly minor variations. Swirling, sensual arrangements, steady rhythms, refrains which work as intensifiers for the mantric verses, Siouxsie’s voice growing more imperious with each release. “Cities In Dust” keeps a lot of that but fits it into a more conventional structure – the chorus is one of their best hooks but it’s also a weird ululating splash of vowels.

It’s that slight tightening of focus that made it my Siouxsie pick in this exercise, but the subject matter plays a part too. I dimly remember seeing a clip of the video and finding it inscrutable and scary – something about Nuclear War, maybe? Most things seemed to be. In fact it’s taking the omnipresent shadow of civilisational extinction and saying, yeah, this has happened to people before. Even if we don’t wipe ourselves out in a flash, what remains of us is dust. What makes “Cities In Dust” appealing is the way the sound and the ideas seem to come together – there is something ancient and pagan about the way Siouxie uses repetition and chanting; if you’d hopped back to 79AD and shown Caecilius or whoever a robed woman with a whitened face and darkened hair hair, howling and pronouncing the death of great cities, he’d have had a reference point for that.

41. SL2 – “On A Ragga Tip” (1992)

There are a bunch of tunes on this list which fit under an umbrella of “pop rave”, songs whose ideal home isn’t so much a warehouse or a field somewhere off the M25 as a waltzer ride at a funfair. Here’s one of them – hardcore that achieves the perfect balance between novelty earworm and properly crunching underground breakbeats. I’m fascinated by the apparent fact that Paul McCartney loved it: hooks will out, but I bet he also appreciated the confidence and simplicity with which the track uses a few parts – the piano intro; the sample; the breakbeat – to make an ever-refreshing whole.

I was 19 when this came out, dizzy with the feeling of having an actual social life for the first time. Rave music was not quite yet what I listened to, or what my girlfriend or my friends liked, but it was out there as a constant wild public presence, something clearly new and exciting and – for many, not just adults – baffling and stupid. The “On A Ragga Tip” video – three minutes of carefree, delighted dancing somewhere in 90s London – captures the mood of the moment: the sound of young Britain, rave music on top of the world.

40. L’TRIMM – “Cars With The Boom” (1988)

The whole UncoolTwo50 project is inspired by a book, Gary Mulholland’s This Is Uncool, which, to my shame, I bought years ago in a remainder bookshop, flicked through, and abandoned: probably it’s at the bottom of a box somewhere now. But I have books like that too, which gave my taste a shove at a moment I needed one. One of them is Chuck Eddy’s The Accidental Evolution Of Rock’N’Roll, which is where I first read about L’Trimm.

Eddy’s approach to rock is hard to describe, which is annoying as it’s that approach which inspires, more than any of the specific records he likes. I suppose you could start with the word “rock”: Eddy likes finding connections between records, and ‘genre’ in its deadening, compartmentalised form is the least useful thread he can pull on. The book is full of lists which careen across time and language and style and credibility, spotting relationships and sparking ideas. And since there was no way – pre-streaming – to follow Eddy through these labyrinths, the implicit lesson is: do it yourself.

Picking up the book to write this post, I was surprised to find “Cars With The Boom” hardly features (it pops up in a list of records with traffic noises in a chapter on Sound Effects Pop). L’Trimm show up a few times and get a photograph – maybe that’s what lodged them in my mind as a thing to investigate. The year after I bought The Accidental Evolution, I downloaded by first MP3, technology catching up with Eddy’s omnivorous approach, turning us all for a while into file-hoarding folder-diggers. I heard “Cars With The Boom” that way. I’ve not talked at all about what it sounds like – it’s one of the final records to have that spark of joyful spontaneity you get in early rap without it seeming like an affectation. You can absolutely buy into the idea that these are two friends kicking back, making great pop because the sun is out and they can.

In the pop polls, Prince was nominated well over 30 times, something no other artist came near. He won one poll – LP closers, with “Purple Rain” – and came second in Soundtracks (“When Doves Cry”) and Duets (“U Got The Look”). That last set the terms of engagement: as a duet, it’s not exactly exceptional. As a banger, it’s hard to deny.

Prince did so well in our polls because he’s a staggeringly consistent singles artist for over a decade: well into the 90s, when nobody’s calling the LPs classic, he’s putting out funk hits of punishing effectiveness alongside slinky sex jams and psychedelic oddities like “7”. Lots to pick from for a challenge like this, and I had a devil of a time narrowing it down to a handful.

There’s always some back and forth on the challenge hashtag about the merits of picking one song per artist, which explicitly isn’t a rule, but which a lot of players do anyway. The strong argument against doing it is that it subjects people like Prince, with a shit-ton of great singles, to vote splitting which damages his standings in the final countdown. The argument for doing it is that 50 songs is, frankly, nothing, and diversity makes the listing process more interesting and allows a broader spread of artists.

Both points make a lot of sense. It’s down to how an individual relates to the idea of ranking songs, really. If you feel in your heart you have a definite set of 50 eligible songs you prefer to any others, then you should probably not put extra constraints on them. If things are more fluid, and you have say 100 or 200 or 500 songs which might, on the right day, find themselves on the list – well, you’re already doing triage on your taste, so why not make it easier by limiting artists?

I landed on the “one per artist” side, which left me with a tricky Prince choice. Honestly, I haven’t listened to a Prince record for fun in a while – that’s the downside of him showing up in every poll and challenge. But I couldn’t leave him out: with other acts, I let fatigue sway me, but Prince had a slot reserved.

Apologies for this endless faffing around. Why “Alphabet St”? It was a moment of inspiration. I was shopping in Sainsbury’s, and into my head came a voice, and the voice was of Prince, and he was saying “Cat! We need you to rap!”. And my decision was made. I played the song to check I was right, and I was. Googling, I found a bit of news that had passed me by: Cat Glover died last month.

There’s a lot going on in “Alphabet St”, but Cat’s rap is the centre of it – on the album version, at least. The song otherwise feels almost like Prince by numbers – no, that’s the wrong metaphor – Prince doing what he does better than anyone else, but it’s what we know he can do, it’s audibly a relation to “Kiss”, “U Got The Look”, “1999”, and all the funkier side of Prince’s work. Except it has Cat Glover there, in the middle, shaking it like a horny pony would. 

It’s a captivating moment because it’s Prince incorporating rap into his work and it sounds self-conscious, a novelty – the greatest practitioner of Black pop music in the 1980s trying to work out what to do about the most important development in Black pop music in the 1980s… and he doesn’t quite know. Prince can seem so perfect, even at his strangest, such a sealed bubble of talent and proficiency, and when you hear him trying stuff out there’s an electricity to it that lets me back in. It had to be my Prince pick because it’s a song that makes me want to play more Prince again.

44. DEAD OR ALIVE – “You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)” (1984)

I performed triage on my list in a bunch of different ways but one of them was this. My brother messaged me to let me know he was doing one of his irregular club nights. I decided to go. My selections were down to about 120 at that point, and I made a sacred vow. If any of the DJs played one of the remaining tracks, in it went. This was the only song played that night still under consideration, and so I had to include it.

I don’t dance much these days, and I was never a ‘dancer’ in the sense of someone who knows what moves to make when, or how to follow a beat and ride out a night on the floor. I bounce around to the songs I know and wander off for a beer at times. But dancing – in the widest possible sense of being put in motion by music – is still central to my idea of pop. It’s one of the things that only music can do. Lots of other arts can make me feel or think, but they can’t make me move. So that physical element is the heart of music, even if it isn’t the heart of how I practice listening to it.

“You Spin Me Round” is about motion as metaphor; the literal movement of a 7” single as the intoxication revolution of desire. It’s also, because it’s Pete Burns doing it, about the specific motion of performance – existing in the world in a particular way, as a particular being, an apparition in eyepatch and purple robes and a tower of frizzy dark hair. The record sounds like machines being driven too fast, sequencers like maddened horses pulling Burns’ chariot out of control. It’s a spectacular piece of pop; I’m glad my secret promise landed it here.

43. TEARS FOR FEARS – “Head Over Heels” (1985)

Pete Burns’ contemporaries, though this couldn’t be further from Dead Or Alive’s giddy abandon. “Head Over Heels” sounds like a giant moving slowly, trying not to break anything as he maneouvres himself into place (the Big Chair!) and the song can start. Synthpop in 1982 – the time of Tears For Fears’ first album – seemed skinny and tentative in comparison to what the band were making in 1985; great architectural masses of machine-built sound still arranged to let in light and space, with Roland Orzabal’s knotted-up anxieties and hopes grown huge to fit their environment.

How big can this get? How large a stage can we fill? What do we do when we fill it? In 1985 these were urgent questions, with pop thrust into a social role, and into physical spaces, that rewarded ambition and hubris. Tears For Fears move through those spaces with a sound that says they’re born to it and with a vulnerability that says they know how treacherous the job is. No “big music” has ever worn its size with such discomfort, which is a reason Songs From The Big Chair fascinates me while comparable albums bore.

Se Dice is structured around two main pieces: the titular track and “Please Heat This Eventually”, along with the interstitial moments that support them and a few more traditional album tracks. Personnel is very broadly the same as the first iteration of the ORL Group (at the time touring under the moniker the Omar Rodríguez-López Quintet): Adrián Terrazas González on woodwinds, Marcel Rodríguez-López on drums/percussion and synthesisers, bassist Juan Alderete de la Peña, occasional guest vocals from Cedric Bixler-Zavala and even bonus Jon Theodore drumming on the final track. Also present are ORL collaborative chums Money Mark and John Frusciante, so quite understandably, there are strong Mars Volta from another pant leg of the Trousers of Time-vibes. 

As this is only his third studio solo release, there are many historical contemporaneous reviews and sexy, important fan thoughts. For the most part, Sputnikmusic wasn’t overly impressed with the amount of ambient sound in the lengthy intros and interludes, and found the instrumental jams ‘boring and repetitious’. But I also found high praise from fans on Progarchives and Rate Your Music who were impressed by the ballsy, experimental playfulness and the depth of emotion present. 

Normally, I take umbrage with songs where the lyrics are audible but incomprehensible, and “Se Dice Bisonte, No Bùfalo” disagreed with a few fans for this very reason. Instead, I took to it almost instantly, from the misleading intro’s soft plinkyness. Yes, the vocals are overlaid with a persistent buzz but are drenched with emotion; with CBZ, the words themselves often don’t matter and are likely to be tuneful gibberish and subject to personal interpretation, like the details of the concept behind Frances the Mute. The song pulses in concentric waves, with Money Mark’s piano crashing through the chaos effectively by folding in on itself in soft plumes. False outros also usually annoy me, but when they are followed by ORL shred, I make an exception, and although Bec cannot live on shred alone, it is often very tempting.

The other main track “Please Heat This Eventually” is a truncated version of the joint EP featuring Damo Suzuki of Can on vocals. Where that was a sprawling twenty-five minutes split into six movements, this instrumental version is just under half that length. Typical of this era, noodly woodwind is prominent, and its repetitiousness is an exercise in stamina, if nothing else. But everyone gets their moment in the sun, and although at point it nearly becomes A Bit Too Much, it’s rather fun. If you laid on some CBZ vocals, it could easily pass as an Amputechture b-side or an outtake from The Bedlam in Goliath.

And that’s exactly what you get with “Rapid Fire Tollbooth”, an earlier version of “Goliath”. This iteration has swapped frenetic energy and falsetto gymnastics for vibes that give sleazy, late-night jazz lounge. The lyrics retain the cadence but are modified with some delightful slants and the kind of poetic logic I adore (I cut off the hand that was promised to me / and then we’ll shake on it). It all builds towards the kind of guitar solo that sustains me – from 3:17 you’re going to want to turn the volume up as high as possible and let your ears blister.

Much in the way The Dude’s rug tied the room together, the main tracks are connected with excellent aural glue; the ponderous bass on “Luxury Of Infancy”, the spacey comfort of “Thermometer Drinking The Bussness Of Turnstiles”, some classic MRL beats and never unwelcome John Frusciante on “If Gravity Lulls, I Can Hear The World Pant”, and the shakers and salsa grooves of “Boiling Death Request A Body To Rest Its Head On”. Like many other fans, I also enjoyed engaging in some Mars Volta archeology during “Lurking About In A Cold Sweat (Held Together By Venom)”, which either borrowed from or gave to the unreleased Mars Volta song fans named “Clouds”, and was the opening track from The Ramrod Tapes. The album concludes in an explosion of punky sass, with CBZ again providing vocals on “La Tiranía De La Tradiciòn”. He’s deployed his bratty, At The Drive-In vocals for a song which is admittedly piercing and often difficult, but fun at its core.

Practically speaking, Se Dice Bisonte, No Búfalo is a Mars Volta record; one that psychically straddles Amputechture and The Bedlam in Goliath. When I listen to it, it acts as a kind of time machine back to when I jumped onboard as a card carrying stan during the band’s midlife point between their initial rebirth out of At The Drive-In via De Facto, and when it all blew up in an awful storm of mercurial egos and cult-brainwashed trauma. But apart from being a nostalgia soundtrack, it just plain rocks, and I can’t give a heartier stamp of approval than that. 

Track listing:
The Lukewarm
Luxury Of Infancy
Rapid Fire Tollbooth
Thermometer Drinking The Bussness Of Turnstiles
Se Dice Bisonte, No Bùfalo
If Gravity Lulls, I Can Hear The World Pant
Please Heat This Eventually
Lurking About In A Cold Sweat (Held Together By Venom)
Boiling Death Request A Body To Rest Its Head On
La Tiranía De La Tradiciòn

The UncoolTwo50 challenge period covers the time – roughly speaking, 1989 to 1996 – when I took a lot of my cues about music and its quality from the weekly music press. This period has a mixed reputation – it was the heyday of the build-em-up knock-em-down scene-making NME, which would come up with new “movements” on a regular basis. The first few times it pulled this trick I took it very seriously. From about 1992 I still read the NME but switched to Melody Maker, which seemed more curious, more diverse and more intellectually exciting. Sometimes the Maker’s attempts to broaden its mind were a bit awkward – around 1993 it declared that there’d always been a dance element to its coverage and acted as if nobody had written about house, techno, or drum’n’bass before, which mostly wasn’t true. But you did get the feeling it was making genuine efforts to do better on stuff like hip-hop. Of course, Britpop came along and both weekly papers lost a lot of their curiosity chasing it. Also, I left university.

Whatever edge the Melody Maker had on hip-hop coverage was down almost entirely to Neil Kulkarni, the late music writer who gives his name to the challenge’s affirmative-action protocol: a maximum of 70% of tracks purely credited to white men. As challenge master Arron happily acknowledges, the Neil Kulkarni Clause is a blunt instrument genre-wise, making no distinction between Beastie and Pet Shop Boys, Utah and Pale Saints. But it’s also a necessary instrument – it’s deliberately a very low bar, serving mainly as a nudge to remember diversity in your choices.

Kulkarni was a firebrand writer, as known for what he hated as what he loved. I met him once, for about two minutes at a gig where he was selling copies of alt-metal mag Terrorizer, and any eulogy I could offer would be phoney: like most friends-of-friends who die young, I took his second- or third-hand presence in my social circles for granted, and thought warmly of him while never taking the time to get to know him. I was shocked to hear he’d died, and felt a surge of gratitude for the music he’d introduced me to back in that time I’d read him weekly. I assumed most Melody Maker writers, even then, were much older than me. He really wasn’t.

“Shook Ones Pt II” is a young man’s record, about bravado and fear, two emotions linked by how people describe them: cold sweat, cold as ice. It’s a chilly record, matter-of-fact poker-faced rhymes on top of Havoc’s freezer unit drone, shards of piano poking through the tundra. It’s a remarkable beat for someone so young to have created, a sound that theatrically defies and embraces death at the same time. At some point Kulkarni wrote about it, or its parent album, in Melody Maker, and I filed the title away, hearing it a year or two after and returning to it occasionally. When I heard the bad news, it was the first song I played.

47. CHRIS REA – “Josephine (La Version Francaise)” (1987)

Working at the Music & Video Exchange – even in the books department – was a sneak preview of the universal jukebox era. We could borrow any record we wanted to play in the shop; we had a tape to tape deck in constant use under the counter, running off copies of out of print gems and new promos. Things that had been curiosities to a music press reader became easy reality, a balance to the horrific wages that meant I spent most of a year living off Gregg’s Sausage Rolls.

One day a promo came in for Classic Balearic Mastercuts. The idea of Balearic Beat – the legend of it, you might say – had a strong allure for me. Pop at its most open-minded, a dream of a moment when vibe, not genre, ruled the DJ booth and when The Woodentops would rub shoulders with obscure Arthur Russell 12”s and Chris Rea remixes. I glossed over the pharmaceutical building blocks needed to build utopia – from my bedroom it seemed an ideal of democratic taste.

In the world of mood-based Spotify playlists that dream is now a kind of norm and chill beats to study to are nobody’s path to paradise. Still, the Mastercuts compilation was a revelation at the time, ranging from the blissed out house of A Man Called Adam to the impish hopscotch of Lola’s “Wax The Van”. The track which started it all off was this Chris Rea 12”, a re-recording of “Josephine” meant for the European market where its sun-kissed ripples of synth and post-disco guitar figures wouldn’t create any kind of culture shock. The vocal, gruff and rockish, is untouched – Josephine is off living the island life, watching the sun come up after a night at Ku or Pacha; Chris, like me in the second-hand bookshop, can only dream fondly of such exotic shores.

46. SWV – “Right Here (Human Nature)” (1993)

Remarkable though his records were – and that includes the fucked-up, overdriven, later ones, documents of a burning brain (maybe a burning conscience too) – there was never much of a chance of Michael Jackson making my UncoolTwo50 list. There’s a balance in this game between “everyone owns this song” and “I own this song”, you need a bit of both – a track with some kind of public presence but a personal connection too. And Jackson ends up too far on the “everyone” end of things.

But this track, and its use of him! That’s a different thing. I don’t remember when I first heard “Right Here (Human Nature)”, or rather – since I guess it was pleasantly around at the time – when I first heard it. It feels like the kind of thing I moved around from house to house, PC to PC, existing as “righthere.mp3” in a folder, a constant, always soothing playlist presence. “Human Nature” is the dark horse of Thriller (well, unless PYT is), a cosmic coo that settles the jitters and twitches Jackson built his music around. SWV are simply making that subtext into text.

There was a bit of chat the other day when Pitchfork released its list of Top Tracks Of The 2020s So Far; as is often the way it was sparked by the site’s practice (a tale as old as time) of taking regional scenes, or in some cases national scenes, and anointing one track from among them. There’s a bit of kayfabe going on here – we know, and they know, that the lone and excellent baile funk song they pick is not the best baile funk song of the last 5 years any more than Noah chose the best giraffe, it’s about collective breadth creating an illusion of depth. If you want to be harsh, the squeak rap, Rio funk, and other one-shot tracks congregating near the bottom of the list are a matte scenery painting in front of which the true dramatis personae – Lana, Kendrick, Fiona et al – can perform.

But I don’t want to be harsh. I think the open-armed policy, gesturing at worlds of music beyond the centre of critical attention, is a very good thing, even if the performance of expertise accompanying it gets exhausting. My preference has always been to admit the differentials in knowledge and interest going into a list, and of course to make sure that what you’re picking is still, you know, good. Maybe there is no true critical centre to push out from, but there’s an attentional centre, and there are things advertisers want a music site to cover, and you can move away from those and have value even if an individual blurb is no more than a gesture. (There are more detailed debates to be had about which gestures are worth making, of course.)

All of which is a rambling way of saying that I’m glad I first encountered “C’Mon N’ Ride It (The Train)” as an unwanted promo CD single, discounted to 50p, and not when it came top of the 1996 Pazz And Jop Singles Poll, which would have established a context for it in probably unwelcome ways. I’m not sure this song got a UK release, and while there’s no reason for it not to do well – we handed two No.1s to the Outhere Brothers! – it feels like an unlikely import without some Radio 1 DJ getting behind it for a laugh.

It’s not a subtle record. I bought it, unheard, because it had a train on the front and because it looked like a good time. I was right. As seven minute tracks based on train noises go, it’s less beautiful than Kraftwerk, but more effective. We aren’t here to admire the scenery, unless “the scenery” is the other passengers, but even the sexual metaphor is a distraction here: sometimes a choo-choo is just a choo-choo, Herr Doctor.  No, we are here to ride the train. The axles and pistons of the song come from Barry White, put to piledriving use, but the MC conductor is doing heroic work stoking the boiler. I particularly like how the tempo starts to drop on the fade, though – hey! We’re reaching the station!

I don’t know, but can guess fairly easily, why this regional party hit broke containment and became a national smash – it was the year of the Macarena, a good moment for big dumb songs. What I’m not so sure about is how it then contrived to top the annual list of the rock critics of America, a body not known for friendliness toward “jock jams”. It feels like an outlier, everyone picking the same token fun track before getting back to the proper business and getting a shock when the votes tot up. The unstoppable momentum of the collective elevating a song about exactly that.

The problems of tokenism in lists – and rare triumphs like this – happen more at this collective level, when individual experience and judgement is tipped into the general soup. Pitchfork, in particular, no longer has bluffers like me writing for them – or they used not to before they fired half the staff – and the days of Ryan Schreiber jive-talking his way through a Coltrane review were an embarrassing memory even when they did. But one contributor’s deep love and knowledge of the squeak rap game can look like smirking or pomposity when it’s piped over the editorial tannoy, next to 99 other blurbs all writing with the same habit-hardened authoritative distance. Collective voice in an individual-influencer world is a problem.

This song is now as old as “Sugar Baby Love” by The Rubettes was when Luke Haines borrowed its hook for “The Rubettes”. It’s been squatting in my head for those 25 years; it was one of the first records I wrote about on Freaky Trigger. It’s an odd song to have dwelt on for so long, not one of the group’s most famous, certainly not a hit, and from an album which tended to be overlooked in favour of Black Box Recorder, which wore its cleverness on its sleeve a bit more.

Haines is a brilliant lyricist on his day, but his brilliance is largely in suggestion and implication – on Baader Meinhof, the record “The Rubettes” is the pop cousin of, he’s making things which are not so much songs about the Baader Meinhof Gang as sigils designed to evoke or recover a mood of paranoia and violence and terror and fascination. Recover, but not necessarily explain or understand – the past, especially the past of your childhood, is so drenched in emotional association you can never quite see it clearly. Ancient, formative connections wait in your synaptic underground, ready to overload you with inchoate feels. Just before sitting down to write this I saw a photograph of an Acornsoft videogame from 1980, which I had never played or knew existed, but just the font unmoored me and left me, for a few seconds, desolate.

If you’re reading this then pop music was probably a supreme generator of these buried Proustian energies for you. Like anything powerful and barely understood it caused its own folklore and customs, rituals to describe and channel the ineffable. Making lists, obviously. But also the powerful idea of pop as a kind of secret friend – the adolescent smuggling a transistor radio into bed to listen after lights out, the music helping them navigate a difficult age.

This is the central image “The Rubettes” takes and twists, superimposing sexual awakening – what else do teenagers get up to under the blankets? – with pop awakening and suggesting both of them are writing cheques some people are unable to cash. “The Rubettes”’s chorus, a death’s head singalong of a tacky 1970s pop song, is built to trigger nostalgia and to mock it. The rest of the song is a string of suggestive phrases and double-edged lines: the subject of the song, if something this slippery has one, is a social inadequate, unable to cope in the adult world of discos and dancing.

But that world itself is deeply repressed, banishing the sad songs under its metaphorical bedclothes. “Weren’t the 90s great?” Haines sings in the most venomous way possible, and the song’s video – a collection of 70s news footage and Test Cards with Haines himself inserted at points – suddenly spools forward to take in Thatcher, John Selwyn Gummer, Peter Mandelson… nostalgia may be false comfort but modernity is hardly inspiring, mostly offering a future where all possibilities have been sold off to someone already.

“The Rubettes” video reminds me of Adam Curtis, and Britpop bands in the 90s had been like characters in a Curtis documentary, imagining they could use the past, mastering its forces for their own end. But – oh yes – this was a fantasy. The Auteurs appeared in 1992 as contemporaries of Suede, a band who looked backwards in a way that felt exciting, playful, sexy. Seven years on, with the long Britpop hangover beginning, “The Rubettes” felt like an acid comment on a shallow era which had ended up drowned by the past it sought to invoke.

So how does it feel now? It’s still lodged in my head, it’s still making me think, and I still love it as a performance. Luke Haines has no stronger a voice than any other British indie singer, in fact considerably weaker than many: he sounds like a discontented goblin. But “The Rubettes” is him taking his voice’s sickly qualities and writing a song that uses them perfectly. “Rock and roll will never die” he sings, with a consumptive malignancy that lets you know its survival was ensured by monkey’s paw.

Other parts land differently now. When Haines sings “at least you’re still alive”, it sounds, and is surely meant as, a mockery, but now I think hey, fair enough. When this song came out I was restless and desperate to avoid nostalgia. Now I understand I can’t, but I can still flatter myself and think I can use it well, walk those spaces between reminiscence, regret and reaction and surprise myself still. I knew “The Rubettes” would be the first song I picked for the UncoolTwo50 list as soon as it was announced – sitting right at the end of an era of pop, casting a retrospective curse over it. But I also knew it would be at the bottom of that list: its cynicism can only take me so far.

Some harsh cuts this time particularly in the funk, soul, dance & R&B departments. It’s a bad business and no mistake.

80. SOS BAND – “Just Be Good To Me” (1984)

The massive zeppelin type craft on the cover of the SOS Band album is an accurate representation of this 80s soul/funk behemoth; not that Beats International’s remake of it is anything to sniff at, you understand, but the original has a pomp and splendour it’s difficult to match.

79. SHALAMAR – “Work It Out” (1980)

This made it into the Top 50, then I decided to swap it out partly because I’m not completely sure it was actually a single? Wikipedia doesn’t have it. Anyway I was on a very heavy early 80s soul tip during the preliminary rounds of listmaking and some of it’s fallen away, a bit of a shame I think: I’ll decide over the early days whether more might return. A lot of soul music is pleading or raging; Shalamar here are sweetly reasonable, and I love it.

78. JX – “There’s Nothing I Won’t Do” (1996)

Another one that got all the way in and was cruelly forced out by a track along similar lines I liked more. Rex The Dog got a shout with the Knife’s “Heartbeats” remix in the 00-23 leg of the macro-challenge, anyway. “There’s Nothing I Won’t Do” comes out of the tracks in euphoric fashion but does it actually go anywhere else after it’s first minute? It’s still awesome so perhaps that shouldn’t matter.

77. KLYMAXX – “Meeting In The Ladies Room” (1984)

UH-OH! The dry boom and snap of mid-80s funk is one of the sounds I found myself loving most making this list. Ultimately there just wasn’t room for Klymaxx’ jaw-dropping saga of shoulder-padded rivalry and the bathroom blitz. “I had to leave my condo for this!”, this being a place in the low 70s on the list, yes, I’m sorry, I’d be annoyed too.

76. DOLLY PARTON – “9 To 5” (1980)

Clearly a perfect record but I’ve just heard it too often – it’s at its most beguiling when it sneaks up on you a bit. Appeared in the original Uncool50 list as part of a stretch of genre-bending records about work, capitalism, the pressures of modern living, and made sense as part of that chronological mix. Which also included…

75. WHAM! – “Wham! Rap (Enjoy What You Do)” (1982)

Listen Mr Average you’re a jerk! The British “The Message”, but that isn’t on the list either. I understand that there’s a kitschy dimension to some people’s appreciation of this song and I’m not going to lie and say I can’t see it, but I do honestly think this is a really great, funny, catchy record. If they’d only ever made this it would be a strange Brit-funk lost gem, except it’s very obvious when you hear it that this is not somebody who would only ever make one pop record.

74. CHAKA DEMUS & PLIERS – “Murder She Wrote” (1993)

The rough-and-smooth combination on pop-ragga hits is such and endlessly pleasing formula! Here’s some sweet voiced loverman and then what pops up but “Yuh face is pretty but yuh character dirty!”. Hoping – though not with much expectation – that others can carry the torch for the Summer Of Ragga.

72=. OMNI TRIO – “Renegade Snares (Foul Play Remix)” (1994)

The actual rave and jungle records I have in my list are very much at the “would you care for this Waltzer to go a little faster Miss?” end of the genre so this was a last outpost of the more credible, scientifically programmed (yet still deeply slamming) wing of drum&bass. If we were only voting on intros or moments, the drums at the start of “Renegade Snares” would be Top 10.

72=. JUSTIN TIME – “Sweet In Pocket ‘97” (1997)

And here’s its inverse, some happy hardcore that simply gurns too hard to be included. The complex interplay of breaks and multiple keyboard and vocal hooks on “Sweet In Pocket” seems just as intricately crafted as Omni Trio’s work but I admit the enormous 4/4 drumbeat may draw one’s attention from that just a little.

71. AALIYAH – “Are You That Somebody?” (1998)

This one was a difficult cut, on one shoulder sat an angel saying “you need a Timbaland production on your list” and “it’s so innovative”, and on the other sat a devil saying “it’s brilliant but do you actually ever play it Tom, outside the context of thinking of clever and forward-thinking it is?”. And the devil won. Again, I did have an Aaliyah track (“More Than A Woman”) in another challenge.

90. ULTRAMARINE ft ROBERT WYATT – “Kingdom” (1993)

I think if I was going to write one of those David Hepworth style “the year that changed everything” books it would be about 1993, because it was a year that didn’t change anything but where – with hindsight – the possibilities of music felt a little bit wider than they did even 12 months later, after Cobain’s death, Definitely Maybe, and the acceleration of dance music along its superclub axis. A lovely, hard-to-pin-down year full of untaken paths, like this odd team up between folksy techno duo Ultramarine and old prog hand Robert Wyatt singing (I believe) a 17th century diggers song. At the time this felt better-on-paper but over the years it’s lodged in my brain to the point where it works to sum up the era.

89. DAWN PENN – “You Don’t Love Me (No No No)” (1994)

The 50 tracks that didn’t get in are studded with huge bangers which I just wasn’t in the mood for in the sliver of time in which I made the list. Might suffer from having TOO GOOD of an intro, the Crazy World Of Arthur Brown of its day.

88. DAVID BOWIE – “Ashes To Ashes” (1980)

Bowie tends to be well covered in these social media polls. I do think this is his best ever single, dig around in the Popular archives for why. But in the last challenge (1954-1976) I voted for what I think is his best ever song – Mott’s “All The Young Dudes” – and it didn’t even make the top 250. So I’m taking my metaphorical space capsule and going home. I am not going to deny that I seriously considered picking Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom” instead, which has to settle for narrowly being the second best song about the guy.

87. THE VALENTINE BROTHERS – “Money’s Too Tight To Mention” (1982)

So here’s where I have to remind readers that this is actually the second “Uncool 50” challenge – the first of them covered 1977 to the present day, but was so skewed towards a tiny patch of said era that challenge-master Arron rejigged the entire thing and now we’re covering those years again. This was one of my picks last time, in fact it might even have got some ‘bonus points’ to nudge it onto the list. It is a wonderful record, a classic soul jam about being caught in the crushing jaws of Reaganomics, later remade (not really as well) by a youthful Mick Hucknall. But I wanted to ring the changes a bit, so a handful of tunes I picked before narrowly miss out.

86. GANG OF FOUR – “At Home He’s A Tourist” (1979)

Another one I picked last time, another brilliant single, the way the guitars chop the song into a set of abstract spaces absolutely radicalised me for post-punk when I heard it in 1991 or so. Not quite as in the mood for abrasion this go-round, so this classic falls by the wayside.

85. NEW ORDER – “Run 2” (1989)

Ah, New Order, who ended up hugely overrepresented in the first run (ho ho) of the Uncool 50 poll. Another one like Bowie where I can’t fault the body of work but individual singles are either “heard it too much” or “not strong enough”. This hidden treasure from Technique came close, though – ultimately me not being sure I’d actually heard the single version remix (hence the “2” in the title) told against it. The lyrics on this are typically Barney-ish but in that zone where his tossed-off lines are actually funny and evocative – “You don’t get a tan like this for nothing” – and he’s not trying to rhyme which is always a mercy. The main attraction though is that languid last two and a half minutes of New Order just being New Order instrumentally, flowing together in ways that are barely a song but immediately them.

84. WAYNE SMITH – “Under Me Sleng Teng” (1985)

A thorny question that always comes up in these polls is historical importance. I’m increasingly inclined to think “fuck it”: the role importance plays is in getting me to listen to things in the first place maybe, but it shouldn’t do much about determining whether I love them or not. Of course I do love “Under Me Sleng Teng” – who couldn’t? – and I hope other people find room for it. But I hope I’d love its infectious bounce even if it hadn’t birthed most of a genre.

83. LLOYD COLE AND THE COMMOTIONS – “Rattlesnakes” (1984)

A lot of mid-80s indie reminds me of the awkward adolescent I was, and the awkward adult I became doesn’t particularly enjoy that sensation. Lloyd Cole stands out not just for how relatively peppy his jangle sounds, but for not evoking that stuff as I never could even aspire as being as cool as the narrator of his songs, whose habit of wearing his taste on his sleeve now registers as endearingly cringey: famously he doesn’t know how to pronounce Eva-Marie Saint, but nor do I so I’m not that bothered.

82. GREEN VELVET – “Preacherman” (1993)

Another one I put into the Uncool 50, and also into a poll – it was a bunch of people’s first encounter with “Preacherman”, which takes the classic 80s/90s ‘sample a preacher over some beats’ move about as far as it can possibly go, an entire sermon about “playing house” – imagine Green Velvet’s glee when he found that one! – with the acid-y music ebbing and surging at the level of the increasingly maddened sermonist. It’s ironic, sure, but there’s also a sympathy and conviction evident in the treatment of the source material that makes it less of a surprise to learn Velvet was himself born again years later.

81. PRINCE AND THE REVOLUTION – “Anotherloverholenyohead” (1986)

First but not last Prince track – again I fell into the Bowie and New Order chasm of “bored of the really famous ones for now” but fortunately with Prince there really are always singles you haven’t thought about for a while that are just as good as the big ones. “Anotherloverholenyohead” walks that most sublime of Prince boundaries, the place where a song meets a jam.

But this is absolutely the formative era for me and pop music, which means not only am I trying to pick 50 records from an absurdly wide and deep pool, I’m also contesting with my younger self, and different versions of my younger self, and – because I revisited this period on Popular and repeatedly with the People’s Pop Polls – previous revisions of what I like.

It’s all too much! At one point my “shortlist” for this exercise had almost 600 songs on, and while some of those were tips of the hat to long-gone teenage editions of myself, never likely to trouble the actual scorers (hi there “Fool’s Gold”!), most weren’t. It was still a devil to wrestle them down.

I ended up with a list of 100 tracks. I could have filled it up entirely with play-it-at-my-funeral perennials, but after four years of pop polling some of those old favourites are having a well-earned rest. (The list of “seeds” – tracks likely to do well – for the challenge is a list of excellent songs I’m fine with not hearing again this decade). So it’s a mix of faithful friends and songs that jumped out of the longlist and sparked something, making me think – why not, eh?

The top 50 songs will run on my Bluesky account, but I’ll post them here when I get to them. This series of posts starts with the 50 that didn’t make it.

100. ICE CUBE – “It Was A Good Day” (1992)

A high-concept song, perfectly executed. Feels like an idea that was hanging around waiting for some rapper to do it – I definitely remember reading descriptions of “It Was A Good Day” long before I heard it which dwelled on its concept and punchline and missed the creamy ambiguity with which Ice Cube executes that stuff. Obviously it’s one of the definitive “this is how you turn a sample into a track” tunes too.

99. THE DISMEMBERMENT PLAN – “The Ice Of Boston” (1997)

The first band I only heard – or heard of – because of Pitchfork, who loved ‘em. More than I did, honestly. When I was an indie fan, the big attraction of the genre was finding a song which exactly matched whatever turmoil you were feeling at the time; in my teens and early 20s, this happened a lot. By my mid-20s, the trick was wearing off; there’s only so many records about miserable dudes a miserable dude can hear before he thinks, maybe taking steps to not be miserable is an option? I first heard “The Ice Of Boston” in the winter of 2000, living on my own in a mostly unfurnished and generally freezing flat, and it was one of the last times when the old “my life – it’s in this song!” impulses kicked in. Nothing else in these 100 tracks sounds much like it.

98. AMIRA – “My Desire (Dreem Teem Remix)” (1997 or 1998)

I found with the “Fear Of Music” challenge (50 singles from 2000-2023) that UK garage was a genre I knew I loved as a whole but pinning it down to specific singles proved really difficult (the same goes for drum & bass in this challenge, and honestly for most of dance music – singles-based genres which make most sense in the mix). “My Desire (Dreem Teem Remix)” gets at the lushness and sweetness of UK garage well enough though, and the deep lego-build pleasure of hearing 2-step rhythms interlock.

97. PET SHOP BOYS – “Can You Forgive Her?” (1993)

I decided on a one-song-per-artist rule in the Top 50, so there are a few duplicates lower down. This was one of the easier dilemmas, as [REDACTED] ultimately fit the shape of the list as it emerged a lot better, so “Can You Forgive Her?” was consigned to the lower end quite quickly. I think, with hindsight, this is the emergence of the Pet Shop Boys’ later style – you can’t imagine anything on Discography fitting onto, say, Hotspot, but you can see this doing so. Is that a good thing? I don’t know. This is a masterpiece, though, a song about the intolerable pressure of living in denial of who you actually are, an unusual subject for a genre in which confident self-expression tends to be a default.

96. SOPHIE B HAWKINS – “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” (1992)

I didn’t intend this juxtaposition to work so well, but here’s more frustrated queer pop from a related but different angle – the agony of being in love with someone trapped in an abusive straight relationship. While “Can You Forgive Her?” is all about refusing pleasure, so its wordy structure and hammering riffs feel slightly ‘off’ as a functioning pop song, “Damn” absolutely demonstrates the liberation and bliss Hawkins is so desperately offering, with one of the most jubilant choruses of the era (“SHUCKS!”)

95. BONEY M – “Rasputin” (1978)

It’s easily overlooked what a total beast this is instrumentally – those drums! Had to be removed from the list 3 times and thrown into the Volga before it settled here, but there is disco to come.

94. GHOSTFACE KILLAH ft MARY J BLIGE – “All That I Got Is You” (1997)

Shameless weepie – there are lots of rap songs out there about loving your poor old mum but this one really hits home for me in a way the others don’t, maybe because Blige does such a beautiful turn giving the mothers’ perspective.

93. HOLE – “Malibu” (1998)

I heard “Celebrity Skin” in a club – well, a pub with people dancing in it – before finalising the list and thought “Wait! Have I made a terrible error?” (and then didn’t put “Malibu” in my Top 50 anyway). “Celebrity Skin” is the one likelier to do well in the overall challenge but the yearning and anger in “Malibu”, and the fact Courtney Love doing a broken-hearted power ballad is such a good idea, makes it the one for me.

92. DOUBLE TROUBLE ft THE REBEL MC – “Street Tuff” (1988)

YES. It’s the Rebel MC. When the list got down to about 200 I realised that it included basically every UK hit from the late 80s with any kind of hip-house element, because they’re all terrific. This is the British equivalent of Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two”, an unimpeachably joyful one-off which even rap sceptics (judging by the kids at my school) had no choice but to vibe to.

91. BROADCAST – “Echo’s Answer” (1999)

No other song on the list – and no other song I know, really – feels like this. It seems perverse that it was even a single, especially as this band could and did do extremely good singles that are also catchy pop songs not whatever radiophonic hauntology nursery rhyme is happening here. But that’s its beauty, asking you to imagine a sideways step into a mirror world where things like this are pop singles.

I may or may not get the next one of these up before the challenge officially starts on Monday night and I post the No.50 song, which I knew would be my first one the moment the challenge was announced.

WHICH THRILL? The surviving cast of Harlem Heroes return, forming a team to compete in the new, even more violent sport of Inferno.

THE STORY OF A VIOLENT COMIC

Action, 2000AD’s notorious predecessor, still existed for the bulk of 1977, a meek remnant drifting on the edge of the IPC Youth Group like the lobotomised Alex in A Clockwork Orange. The characters were the same; their exploits sadly different: Hook Jaw, scourge of the deep, was reduced to discreetly conducting his grisly feasts behind rocks. Towards the end of the year, Action was put out of its misery, a baleful reminder of what happened when violence and transgression crossed the lines.

But what lines? Discussions of violence in early 2000AD took place in Action’s shadow, but violence in comics was not a monolith. Treating it as one is what the comic’s enemies did, part of a wave of violence on screen, on paper, on the streets, a symptom of a society sliding nearer a precipice. But much comic violence was ignored. For all the grit and body count of Battle Picture Weekly, war comics rarely drew the sort of criticism that led to Action’s dilution. The bullying and psychological torment meted out to some unfortunate heroines of IPC girls’ titles escaped official notice. And even gruesome violence in media could be deployed as a legitimate tactic if the aim was educational: 1977 also saw the release of the controversial Finishing Line, a British Transport Films production that has a weird fantasy-sports plot about competitive games being held on a railway line, with predictable and bloody consequences – all shown on screen.

So each act of violence in 2000AD’s pages is an answer to a set of questions. Who gets to be violent? Who has violence done to them? What sort of violence, and how does the comic frame it?

Science Fiction, as Mills, Sanders, Gosnell et al well knew, was a perfect genre for legitimate violence. We’ve seen how beasts and monsters are sanctioned perpetrators of violence, and how robots and aliens are respectable victims. We’ve also seen how an authoritarian star, Dredd, can dole out remarkable levels of brutality. But that still left several strips which relied on human-on-human violence for thrills – MACH 1, Invasion! and the future sports stories. And these were the ones which continually needed changing and correcting as the comic tried to avoid the invisible tripwires set around it.

The comic’s violence had a set of stakeholders too – the writers and artists; the editorial staff, who set the broad tone on acceptability; the art and production staff, including the “bodgers” whose job it was to alter or white out the most egregious examples. Then there were the immediate management like John Sanders, who tended to be in the firing line when the media, or the likes of the Responsible Society pressure group, came calling. There were the rest of the IPC magazines department, mostly of a more traditional bent, whose editors – something all the 2000AD mainstays agree on – broadly resented the upstart Youth Group titles. Upper management, keen to avoid scandal. Parents. Campaigners. 

And somewhere in there, the readers themselves. We know that from the beginning, not all 2000AD readers were kids. We also know that the launch was aiming for a broader range of young readers than the core market of 8-10 year old boys – Mills and Gosnell were pissed off that the best the promotions department could come up with for the cover-mount free gift was a shitty plastic frisbee, which felt too young. Even so, the median reader was certainly a young boy.

And this can be a hard thing to recapture when you’re thinking about early 2000AD. There’s a temptation to take Action, and the more hair-raising elements of 2000AD, and the stories of what got censored, and look at those things from the perspective of what 2000AD becomes in a few years’ time, a comic with a far higher level of wit and narrative sophistication while still being very clearly pitched at kids. It becomes easy to think, well, Action and early 2000AD are necessary steps to get to prime 2000AD, and the forces which tried (successfully in Action’s case) to censor and dilute them could have smothered a British comics renaissance in its crib.

There’s a lot of truth in this, but the temptation of hindsight misses the delicacy of the actual situation. What everyone working on the titles seems to have been aware of – particularly the more experienced hands like Mills – is that when you’re being read by 8 year old boys you really are making difficult choices, and it’s not just a case of the bold creators against the censorious suits. There’s a sweet spot where the comic is tough and exciting and boundary-pushing enough to be making waves and picking up sales, but on the other side of that are things nobody was ever likely to get away with. The internal reaction to the notorious “Kids Rule OK” Action cover – one of the most high-impact, brutal, famous pieces of 70s UK comics art – was closer to “oh shit” than “hell yeah”. It’s a classic, but it’s a classic that always risked killing the comic off.

Taking risks and pushing the edges of the acceptable is what gets you talked about and admired. Crossing those edges is what makes you a management headache. Which brings us, finally, to Inferno, where the question of violence which has haunted 2000AD since before its launch becomes critical.

GAMES WITHOUT FRONTIERS

The basic idea of Inferno is simple: it’s the sequel to Harlem Heroes, still written by veteran Tom Tully, but now drawn by Massimo Belardinelli, in a straight artist swap with Dan Dare. Aeroball has gone out of fashion, replaced by a newer, more violent sport called Inferno, which the surviving characters have to adopt after a crooked gambling syndicate ruins their good name. So on one level Inferno is in the same mode as its predecessor – the familiar plots of the sports strip grafted onto an invented, futuristic competition.

But when you actually read it Inferno is considerably more radical. In Harlem Heroes, you could get the idea of Aeroball from the first Dave Gibbons’ splash page. But Inferno, the sport, is deliberately incomprehensible – the entire opening sequence is about the Heroes characters not knowing what the rules are, and the reader sharing their total bafflement at some kind of ultraviolent offside rule. “The only way a biker can score is to bounce the ball off an airman who’s inside his OWN score-semi! You should know that!” yells a character at poor Giant.

The inclusion of bikes reminds us not just of Rollerball – the ur-text for all future sports stories at this point – but of Action’s Death Game 1999, which is much closer to Inferno than it was to Harlem Heroes, with the brutality, chaos and corruption of the game more central to the story than any kind of sporting incident. But even Death Game 1999 had a set up readers could intuitively grasp – “spinball”, its future sport, takes place on a gigantic pinball table. However minor, it’s a concession to reality that Inferno won’t match.

The Heroes get the hang of things, though and the first Inferno story is a reprise of familiar Harlem Heroes territory – our guys’ skill and precision beating out cruder opponents. But the story doesn’t pause to explain the game to the reader, because the specifics of Inferno are even less the point than the rules of Aeroball were in the first strip. Inferno involves some players in the sky, others on bikes with a stuntman’s wall of death ringing the arena, and one ‘roided-out goalkeeper with a massive club (the goal is the “Cave”; the goalie is therefore the “Cave-Man”, a name Belardinelli needs no prompting to take literally).

The diversity of roles solves one of the bigger Harlem Heroes problems – the characters had broadly similar looks and personalities. Tully gets to shake things up a little with team composition, and players like Cave-Man Moody Bloo and preening stunt biker Regal Eegle add a bit of extra characterisation, even if its just a shift from zero dimensions to one. But the tactics this complex set-up might imply are of no interest to creators or readers – the point of the combination is to create opportunities for mayhem. It’s a sports comic which takes the hidden truth about sports comics – the sport isn’t really the point – and makes it absolutely explicit. Within a handful of episodes the action leaves the Inferno pitch entirely and the characters are battling their way through a corrupt Casino, which does the classic “Danger Room” thing of switching between holographic and real threats at the touch of a villain’s button. 

So if Inferno is a sports comic that isn’t about sport, what is it about? Easy: violence and weirdness. The cynical genius of Inferno is that the reason for the strip, and the in-story premise, and the reader’s response to the story, are all perfectly aligned. Inferno in fact takes the villain’s motivation from Harlem Heroes – what people want is mayhem, not skill – and says, OK, the bad guy was actually completely right in his analysis, and the Harlem Heroes were wrong. So it’s a story about an ultra-violent future sport replacing less violent versions, which is itself replacing a less violent story about a less violent version, presumably in the hopes that readers will respond to it better.

This means that Inferno is the clearest example yet of something which becomes a bit of a signature move for 2000AD: a strip where the narrative drive, the genre and the premise of the story are not aligned with the protagonists. We saw this in Flesh, which sets up a story where Joe Bronkowski and Earl Reagan are the heroes and actually tells one in which the lead character is Old One Eye and the story is aligned with her goals and perspective. But it’s even clearer in Inferno, which puts the lead characters from a sports strip, with sports-strip goals – rise up the league and clear their name – into what is ultimately a story centred on violence and crime.

And the Harlem Heroes characters, it turns out, cannot survive in such a story. Their essential decency and positive motivation are overwhelmed by the violence of the narrative they’ve found themselves in. If Inferno is remembered – beyond for almost getting 2000AD cancelled, of which more in a moment – it’s remembered for its ending, a massacre of every single lead character except for Giant himself and for Cindy, the team’s one woman player, who got away with a mere maiming. It’s possible that the only reason even Giant survives this slaughter is that he’s previously appeared as an old man in a Judge Dredd strip – this is the phase of the comic where the editors are still toying with a shared 2000AD universe.

What’s more important than the fact of the massacre is the way it’s told. There was a similar deck-clearing at the end of the Harlem Heroes strip, with “Hairy” and Conrad King meeting their end on the pitch. But the cast of Inferno are even denied the dignity of on-panel deaths – two of them are killed off in a text box with only the saddened face of Tharg to mark their passing. The strip ends with the faceless head of the gambling syndicate making it clear: Giant has lost everything because he messed with organised crime, and there will be no victory or vengeance. It is a savagely bleak conclusion to over a years’ worth of stories. There’s only one message the reader can take away from Inferno, from beginning to end: the Harlem Heroes were fools and their ideals were worthless.

Ending a 2000AD strip by wiping out the cast is a trick arguably lifted from its success in Battle, where a single 1977 issue saw no less than three sets of protagonists bite the dust. In any case, by this time it was nothing new. Old One Eye and Shako “died well”, their human adversaries largely didn’t, but all cards in those stories were marked from the beginning. MACH 1, whose ending we’ll cover in the 1978 posts, is more of a shock, but it’s still built to. But little about the first half of Inferno suggests the grimness of its final episodes. So what’s going on here?

LEAVING IT ALL ON THE PITCH

To get a handle on Inferno it’s worth looking harder at its creative team. Tom Tully was a seasoned sports comic pro even by this stage, but he was also not a stranger to controversy – he wrote the “bottling” scene in Look Out For Lefty which helped doom Action. His professionalism didn’t mean a safe or placid approach to storytelling; instead he worked in the old spirit of the blood and thunder boys’ papers and penny dreadfuls. You spent your first page recapping and resolving the last cliffhanger, and your last one introducing a new one. In between you got from A to B with plenty of incident. If the editors wanted laughs, they got laughs. If they wanted mayhem, they could have that too.

This is not a system that rewards strong long-term plotting, let alone thematic development. But it is a system which generates stories that can be extended to indefinite length, especially given a reliable artist. Inferno could go on as long as it was popular, but when its popularity faltered – or when, as may well have happened, it fell foul of management – Tully’s way of working meant the axe could fall on the strip very quickly.

As for the type of story Tully was telling, Inferno feels to me clearly written with its artist in mind. Even compared to the other stories in early 2000AD, there’s a schlockiness to Inferno, a kind of grindhouse gusto, which gets the most out of Massimo Belardinelli. For around 30 of its 40 episodes Inferno is an entertaining romp apparently built around “shit Belardinelli enjoys drawing”. There’s a caveman guy, a bunch of cyborg freaks, biker dudes, a lot of sexy robot women, insanely distorted and unlikely robots and vehicles, and occasional breathtaking visions of the Inferno ‘Firebowl’ stadiums, set in gothically decayed hellscapes of cities which bring home the absolute degeneration of the society the strip is set in. (As well as a bitchin’ name for a future sport, the title is a classical reference).

Belardinelli is having a great, mad, time until close to the final episode, and as with Dan Dare his work alone makes a case for the value of Inferno. It’s wildly imaginative and also tremendously violent – Kevin O’Neill, art editor at this point, remembered repeatedly having to point out the management that it’s ‘only’ robots and cyborgs taking the brunt of the limb-shredding, eye-popping, skull-busting punishment, as Belardinelli draws Inferno like a horror comic more than a sports one. It makes the strip a strange combination of total visual excess masking efficient, but predictable plotting. But either Tully’s ideas for the strip start to flag or the editors push him in the wrong direction. Whichever it is, he brings back Harlem Heroes antagonist Artie Gruber, the point at which Inferno starts to go off the rails.

It’s not that Gruber is a bad villain – he was the most charismatic part of the Harlem Heroes strip, an early indicator that the story, and the comic it appeared in, were more on the side of violence than the plot implied. But Tully has nothing new to do with him – literally, as the Gruber story in Inferno entirely retreads the Harlem Heroes story where Gruber joins the opposing team in disguise. But this time it doesn’t work, mostly because it pushes the action of the story onto the Inferno playing field and asks Belardinelli to communicate what’s actually happening in the match. Which he can’t do, first because even at this stage the story has given us no idea of the actual shape of an Inferno game (why should it? It’s never mattered) and second because the complex, well-choreographed storytelling Dave Gibbons specialised in is Belardinelli’s weakest suit. (Made up for by the gross-out magnificence of his other Gruber scenes, though.)

But the main thing about the second Gruber storyline is that it’s the point where Inferno almost gets 2000AD cancelled.

FINAL WHISTLE

In the Shako entry, I wrote that the violence in Action could transfer to 2000AD fairly easily – switch around the perpetrators and victims to be aliens and cyborgs and dinosaurs, and you could get away with plentiful varieties of murder. What didn’t transfer was the earlier comic’s aggressive cheek. But there was one type of violence guaranteed to bring on trouble – realistic violence, acts readers could in theory imitate. MACH 1 is regularly interrupted by captions telling readers that “only a dum-dum” would imitate John Probe’s brutal activities, and even so the strip was constantly being censored and nastier incidents whited out. 

The exact lines IPC management drew around which actions needed these warnings seem to have been highly inconsistent, not to say stupid. There’s a story in Thrill-Power Overload about a Youth Group editor needing to be talked down after they objected to a Judge being pickled alive in vinegar – kids might, they insisted, climb inside any giant pickling jars they might have at home. But however idiotic the specific examples, the basic point was an article of faith in late 70s media: that kids routinely imitated incidents from TV shows and comics as part of their imaginative play. So the threat of imitation was the trump card anti-violence and pro-censorship campaigners would play when they targeted childrens’ media. When Mary Whitehouse successfully came for Doctor Who, it was over a cliffhanger in which the villain held the Doctor’s head under water – exactly the thing, she said, children would try out for themselves.

And wherever the lines were drawn, a cliffhanger of a cackling Gruber pouring gasoline over Giant and standing over him with a lit match was never going to be on the right side. Coming to this incident reading Inferno now is a stomach-turning moment, as a white villain threatening to torch a Black character alive has an aura of lynchings and racist murders in the real world, though there’s no evidence anyone – creators or management – saw this as a factor at the time. Even so, this is 2000AD’s “Kids Rule OK” moment, the point which might have tipped management against it and killed its long-term hopes of survival.

Accounts of the incident vary – everyone involved agrees John Sanders went ballistic, but there’s confusion as to whether the Gruber cliffhanger, or the body count at the end of Inferno caused the trouble. What all stories agree on is the existential risk to 2000AD, and the way the editorial side of the comic was unusually chaotic during this pivotal moment. Gosnell, the titular editor, had been spending most of his time dealing with Star Lord, the in-house rival to 2000AD that Sanders had ordered him to develop in haste while still doing his 2000AD job. It was an impossible workload, and Gosnell left Nick Landau and Kevin O’Neill in charge of the Prog, both of whom were less cautious and keener to push boundaries.

So the Inferno crisis came along at the riskiest possible time for 2000AD – a moment when a less turbulent and controversial comic was ready and waiting to absorb it. Of course, that’s not what happened: Sanders gambled, as he tells it, on 2000AD being the stronger brand, and Star Lord was the victim of the merger. The lead-up to, and consequences of that decision, will be major themes in the 1978 posts.

But even though the strip itself was bundled quickly to its bloody cancellation, the Inferno incident is a watershed moment for 2000AD, and for the nascent comic’s relationship with violence. If you squint, you can see Inferno as a disapproving commentary on violence in media – Giant and company choose to go with the tide and embrace the violence, and it destroys them. But this is a generous reading of a strip whose basic instincts are to keep the plot rolling in a brutal and exciting way and let Belardinelli go for the visual jugular, a job it did with too much gusto for IPC management. 

History had almost repeated itself. 2000AD had taken the same risks that killed Action, IPC management had clamped down, and both sides ultimately stepped back. 2000AD survived, and would remain a violent comic, often in ways which would make the average Inferno episode look fairly tame. But it’s many years until the Prog risks a story in which the violence is the heart and the point of the strip in the way it was for Inferno. 

So one of the signature moves of 2000AD’s first year – using SF as a cover for greater and greater mayhem – reaches a limit point. The comic would need to find other ways – ultimately more sophisticated ones – to excite its readers. The more darkly comic tones of Shako and Judge Dredd already suggested one route. But the editors also had another idea. How about if a weekly science fiction comic tried a bit of, you know, science fiction?

HOW TO READ IT: Inferno is reprinted in The Complete Harlem Heroes, alongside the original strip.

RECOMMENDED?: It’s unfocused and drags in places, it’s cynically violent, and the ending is shoddily executed, but it’s also Belardinelli unleashed in a way he wasn’t even on Dan Dare, and most episodes have at least something really eye-boggling if you like his style.

NEXT PROG: There may well be an interlude post (or more than one) but that’s the end of Season 1 – I hope you’ve enjoyed it! The main series of Discourse 2000 will return when I’ve written the 1978 posts. Dredd stars in two action epics! 2000AD gets its first (human) female lead! Dan Dare gets involved in a “war” in the “stars”! The fans move in! Robots everywhere! And after a year when 2000AD had the market to itself, serious rivals emerge…

WHICH THRILL? Future Shocks are short (1-4 page usually) science fiction stories which pad out many issues of 2000AD.

LET’S TWIST AGAIN

For readers who came to 2000AD later, the prominence of the first Future Shocks is startling. The basic idea of the feature – done-in-one short SF stories with a twist ending – has stayed the same for 47 years. But these very early Future Shocks not only get their own lead in story (the Tharg piece I talked about last time), they even take over the full-colour centre spreads of 2000AD from the resting Dan Dare.

This central role for Future Shocks is very different from the respectable, even vital, but lowly status they rapidly settle into. Future Shocks and other one-offs are, along with Dredd and Tharg, 2000AD’s only true constants. If Judge Dredd is the prize marrow in Tharg’s alien greenhouse, Future Shocks are the compost, a way to make sure every Prog runs to its full page count, and a way to nurture promising writers and artists for the Prog. This aspect became a bigger part of the Future Shock mythos following the industry-shifting success of Alan Moore, most of whose early 2000AD career was spent providing 4-6 page shorts, many cut to diamond perfection.

These earliest Future Shocks are decidedly not at Alan Moore standard. Most of them, honestly, are bad. But they were obviously an important part of 2000AD’s strategy in its first year. They go hand in hand with the more aesthetically successful but less important “Super Covers”: striking cover images which linked to flash fiction on the letters page rather than actual comic stories. The best of the Super Covers – like Brian Bolland’s flesh-eating frog in an astronaut’s helmet on Prog 27 – are among the most memorable, effective early 2000AD images: the actual stories were almost all a let-down, but they share surprise-twist DNA with the Future Shock series.

Both the Super Covers and the Future Shocks come in at around the same time, Summer 1977, when Pat Mills had handed the new comic editorially over to Kelvin Gosnell, who wrote that original 1975 memo recommending the launch of a science fiction comic. Gosnell, like most subsequent 2000AD editors, only did a modicum of writing himself, including some memorably nasty Dredger strips on Action. As we’ll see in 1978-1979, his comics career at IPC is mostly spent being shuffled between new launches by John Sanders. But he’s a crucial 2000AD figure, and not just because of the memo. Gosnell was an SF enthusiast, probably the biggest one in the Prog’s original stable of writers, and one of his initial ideas for the comic was adaptations of science fiction books. The Super Covers and Future Shocks feel to me like products of his respect for the genre and desire to have a wider range of SF content than the hard-bitten ‘Sweeney-Fi’ heroes of the initial line-up.

If so, it was a noble ambition which foundered on an obvious problem. It turns out that while doing short SF stories is easy, doing them well is extremely hard. And making them a highlight of a comic where readers are rapidly building loyalty to favourite characters is almost impossible. Meanwhile the pace and production process of 2000AD meant it was obvious the comic would sometimes need filler material. There were a few ways to provide it, none very satisfactory. Editorial content took valuable time. Reprints were seen as cheating the reader. Bonus episodes of existing strips, cobbled together out of poor-quality commissioned material, were certainly viable, but tended to end up in the high-selling Annuals or Summer Specials. That left filler stories like Future Shocks as the best solution.

The space-filling nature of Future Shocks didn’t compel them to be bad. But IPC’s policy on commissions meant they often would be. IPC rules were that everything an editor commissioned had to eventually be published, a diktat which would have a huge – and mostly negative – impact on 2000AD as it developed. Because of inevitable delays in the delivery of work, an editor would often commission well ahead of schedule, and end up with more than they needed to actually publish to keep the comic rolling out on time. Annuals and specials took up some of the slack, but an incoming editor would still inherit a filing cabinet of commissioned work, a curate’s egg of highly variable material that was both life-saver and millstone. If they wanted to spike a faltering strip, they still had to run through whatever had been paid for before the axe could actually fall. Future Shocks provided vital flexibility, but the publish-everything policy meant the only chance of quality control lay in the commissioning process – and Future Shocks were especially prone to crapness.

Exactly how prone? That is what we are here to discover! With the possible exception of some of Alan Moore’s material, Future Shocks don’t relate to each other enough, even conceptually or thematically, to make full essays useful. So the way I’m going to handle them and other one offs – Time Twisters, Robo-Tales, et al. – is to simply rank everything published in a year, from worst to best, and let any connections shake out in the process.

Thanks to the feature not getting started until the back end of 1977 we have only 21 stories to cover here, though that’s still enough time for several of the more regular Future Shock tropes to shake a tentacle at us, including all-time favourite The Jamiroquai (named after the line in “Virtual Insanity: “things are big that should be small”)

CLASS OF ’77

21. “BEAUTIFUL WORLD” (Prog 30): Doesn’t even get a writer credit on Tharg’s data banks, and no surprise: a confused, dense story in which – gasp! – the apparent humans are in fact aliens but also – double gasp! – the aliens couldn’t destroy Earth because it was too beautiful.

20. “THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR” (Prog 35): The Ultimate Warrior and his death gaze is engineered to end war forever! And he does! But his creators fear his power and – gasp! – kill him off by showing him a mirror. Shockless work with stiff art.

19. “THE RUNTS” (Prog 41): A real oddity, an entirely dialogue-free story by Steve Moore telling the tale of some giant rats which are about to conquer the world when they – gasp! – simply drop dead from overeating. I’d assume it was a rush job promoting a Super Cover story to Shock status, except the illustrations – by Pat Wright, an artist with a long run on Battle’s spy series Eagle – are rather fine.

18. “THE MONSTERS” (Annual 1978): The first 2000AD Annual provides a mighty SIX Future Shocks and one-offs: this is one of two 1977 Shocks with a – gasp! – “actually they’re robots!” twist, and honestly as far as the story goes it’s the better one, with robots no longer recognising the humans they’re based on and assuming they’re aliens. Unfortunately “The Monsters” has art so amateurish it’s shocking it saw print even in an annual, the traditional dumping ground for unusable pages.

17. “THE SYMBIOTE” (Annual 1978): One feature of the Annual Future Shocks is their length – The Symbiote drags on for an extra-sized eight pages, unfortunate as once again the art is woefully stiff. But there’s some slight hints of a design sense at work in the spaceships, droids, and symbiotic man-droids at play in the script: this is one of the first bits of 2000AD to feel like someone has actually seen photos from Star Wars. The story? A future Bonnie and Clyde are caught and sentenced to become symbiotic human/robot spaceship pilots – ultimately they meet again when – gasp! – their ships find themselves in a duel. Stretches itself very thin.

16. “KING OF THE WORLD” (Prog 25): The first ever Future Shock! Tharg starts as he means to go on with a rare (probably not that rare) DOUBLE JAMIROQUAI – not only is something big that should be small but something is small that should be big! Looks tantalisingly like it might be an anti-racist piece, with the black-haired people fighting the red-haired people in barbarian war. In fact they all exist in a terrarium watched over by – gasp! – human-size ants. Shout out to grandpa ant smoking a pipe.

15. “FOOD FOR THOUGHT” (Prog 26): Fishermen wonder if fish have feelings, before being – gasp! – fished themselves by a UFO. Ominously, the second shock has the same basic idea as the first, but it’s executed better, with properly ghastly aliens and an EC Comics reference tipping the hat to where all these ideas came from. Memorable enough that it was reused years later as an Eagle photo-strip, which I can testify was indeed shocking to a small mind!

14. “HUNTED” (Annual 1978): A Kevin O’Neill joint – Future Shocks are where you have to go for your O’Neill fix in these early years. A small alien is hunted and is about to escapes when he realises he’s been kidnapped for – gasp! – a space safari. Tharg delivers a message about wildlife preservation. There’s a great O’Neill monster, the SPIDERON, on page 2 of an otherwise ordinary tale.

13. “A PROMISED LAND” (Prog 31): Gritty Horacio Lalia art enlivens story of crooks and rich parasites blagging and bribing their way to a ticket off an overpopulated Earth, only to be dropped off – gasp! – on a frozen hellworld. You can see it coming, but Lalia has a good line in the misery of life on a jam-packed planet.

12. “WINGS” (Prog 28): One and a half page Kev O’Neill filler strip – the twist (humankind is dead, leaving – gasp! – animals to fight our wars against robots) has to be explained in a whole paragraph at the end. But the O’Neill dogfight art is a pleasure.

11. “FIRST CONTACT” (Prog 27): It’s another scale-reversal: Aliens come in peace and negotiate a meeting with mankind but – gasp – it turns out their ship is too tiny to spot. The Reverse Jamiroquai, if you’re keeping score. Alan Hebden’s story lets most readers guess what’s coming but the build-up of bickering Earthmen is well done.

10. “JUST LIKE HOME” (Prog 29): It’s Planet Of The Ap-.. er, Frogs, as human astronauts arrive on an alien world which seems just like Earth (because – gasp! – it is). Slyly constructed given the groansome premise, as the story bluffs readers into doubting the obvious twist before delivering it anyway. Extra points for the extremely freaky final panel of human horses.

9. “EXCURSION” (Progs 32-33): Live at the witch trials-ah! The first 2-part Future Shock sees ghastly time tourists leer at Vesuvius and witch burnings before an ill-judged stunt sees – gasp! – them burnt at the stake. Like the tourists in Flesh and the unhelpful Yanks in MACH 1, it’s another example of the Prog having a go at Americans, but at least it gives the story some spice, and Horacio Lalia strikes again with vividly nasty art. 

8. “DEATH BUG” (Annual 1978): One more outing for the stylishly gruesome Horacio Lalia, who gets a Pat Mills script involving a swarm of killer insects in a 1978 Annual one-shot. Transparently the pilot for a rejected series, the threat of the Death Bugs forces a maverick sheriff and an escaped convict to team up, Reagan and Carver style. No twist here to concern ourselves with, but we may speak of this again when a giant insect story does make it to the Prog next year.

7. “SPACE PROSPECTOR” (Prog 40): A 2-pager by BEM fanzine editor Martin Lock and regular House Of Hammer artist Trev Goring, which suffers mostly cos its central idea was done wilder and better in “Play Pool!” (see below). Two prospectors are out mining asteroids, but one of the rocks is – gasp – the egg of a space pteranodon! Thoughtful dialogue and moody art hardly prepare you for that.

6. “THE DREAM MACHINE” (Annual 1978): Another very weird story from the Annual, this time by Belardinelli with an unknown writer – at 10 pages this might have been intended as a mock-up for an actual series. The man with the Highest IQ in Britain is put in the “Dream Machine” which turns his thoughts into images – as he dreams of a visit to Neanderthal times one scientist becomes convinced he’s actually affecting the past and tries to stop the experiment. Then our hero dreams himself onto a spaceship at the edge of the universe, about to witness an ultimate secret. He vanishes, and the scientist watching the image screen – gasp – drops dead! No story in which Belardinelli gets to draw spaceships and cavemen can be all bad, though the annual’s weird printing fucks this up somewhat. But it’s really hard to figure out what the hallucinatory story of “The Dream Machine” is getting at. A pilot for a kind of cross between 2001 and Doctor Who, maybe?

5. “TIME PAST” (Prog 42): Martin Lock again, with a quickie time travel shocker whose twist is obvious but well set-up and delivered with nasty relish. Time traveller gets his mains-powered Time Machine in the post but in prehistoric times there’s – gasp! – nowhere to plug it in. One of the better really short Future Shocks, operating at the basic level of coherence an entertaining story needs to deliver, I’d say, without trying to cram too many ideas in or need to explain everything in a final panel rush.

4. “ROBOT REPAIRS” (Prog 37-38): Some very nice early Brett Ewins & Jim McCarthy work as once again a 2-parter gives a Shock needed breathing space. Self-repairing robots pose a threat to robot repairmen Daryl and Zak, so they simply murder the creator and destroy the prototype. And get away with it, so nobody ever suspects that – gasp – they are robots themselves! Ewins/McCarthy make it all look gloopily vivid and Daryl and Zak’s relationship is an unusually tender moment in a thrill-at-all-costs era.

3. “END OF VOYAGE” (Annual 1978): Uncredited on the database, and drawn by someone who switches unsettlingly between fine rendering and brooding, sketched-in figures. A billionaire is caught in a nuclear test and loses his hair, becoming obsessed with the threat of nuclear war. To escape from his anxieties he enters an Atlantic sailing race, only to hear on the radio of increasing international tensions, and just as he sails into New York war breaks out (gasp!) – the last panel shows the Statue Of Liberty’s head being blown off. Unquestionably something found at the back of a filing cabinet but this long story has a weird, outsiderish intensity: a scrawled, haunting strip.

2. “FANG” (Prog 34): High up solely because it’s 4 pages of Carlos Ezquerra, with spacer uniforms and blaster guns that will bring a warm glow to anyone waiting for John Wagner to hurry up and invent Strontium Dog. A deliciously goofy looking vampire is our main threat, killing everyone on board a ship save the cook, who wards him off with – feeble gasp! – garlic powder! Pretend you can’t read the language and it’s a gem.

1. “PLAY POOL!” (Prog 36): I regret to inform you that the best Future Shock of 1977 is this extremely stupid story which deploys the Jamiroquai in classic manner. What is this weirdly smooth new planet? OH NO it’s – gasp! – an alien snooker ball! Gets the top spot mostly because I can’t believe they actually ran with it. Also the first credited Future Shock – a moment of great pride for Kelvin Gosnell and Kev O’Neill. If the charming nonsense of the concept doesn’t convince, bear in mind that O’Neill gets to draw giant aliens and some of his gorgeous, chunky, ironclad-looking spaceships. Simple pleasures but I’ll take ‘em.

Where does all this leave us? Twenty weeks after Tharg introduced them, Future Shocks are already a bran tub full of mostly sub-par stories. There are some fine creators on show, but Future Shocks aren’t yet working as a proving ground for future talent – the familiar names here are already IPC regulars, whether at Battle or on 2000AD itself. There’s one hint of things to come, though – the appearance of Martin Lock, who never moved past the Future Shock stage as a 2000AD creator, but whose close involvement in fandom suggests how the worlds of 2000AD and British fandom were beginning to move closer together. Lock’s fanzine BEM ran a column about British comics: “that should be worth about 25 words” scoffed one letter-writer in the May 1977 issue. Six months on, times were changing.

HOW TO READ IT: All the stories from the actual Progs are collected in The Complete Future Shocks Vol. 1, which runs all the way to 1980 and is available from the 2000AD webshop. The one-offs from the 1978 Annual have never been reprinted as far as I know: I used a scan of the book.

RECOMMENDED? Well, it’s a mixed bag. Future Shocks are a lot of fun as a snapshot of developing talent and changing artistic styles but as actually satisfying comics many if not most fall a bit short at this stage. The collected Shocks is excellent value for money if you are interested (and by 1980 the quality is a bit higher).

NEXT PROG: It’s the end of Season 1 of Discourse 2000 as the Harlem Heroes return and the Prog reaches levels of violent action that threaten its very existence! INFERNO!

WHICH THRILL?: Tharg The Mighty is the alien editor of 2000AD, who occasionally takes time out from his work running the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic to star in his own adventures.

HE’D LIKE TO COME AND MEET US BUT HE THINKS HE’LL BLOW OUR MINDS

Zarjaz. Scrotnig. Splundig Vur Thrigg. Galactic Groats. Rigelian Hotshots. Quaxxan. Squaxx Dek Thargo. The Dictators Of Zrag. 2000AD, and 2000AD fandom, has its own private lingo, built around the words of 2000AD’s alien editor Tharg The Mighty, a Betelgeusian with a healthy regard for his own abilities who operates out of his ‘Nerve Centre’ HQ. Aside from one mid-90s attempt to defenestrate him, Tharg has been a constant presence in 2000AD since Prog 1, and it’s all I can do as a fan not to open these posts with his cheery greeting of “Borag Thungg”.

Tharg’s role in 2000AD goes somewhat beyond the standard editorial duties on a boys’ comic. He hosts the letters page, as was usual, and makes announcements. But he’s also a 2000AD character himself, and occasionally gets his own stories, which I’ll be covering here. And these stories also do double duty, mixing goofy myth-building adventures with coded transmissions reflecting actual goings-on behind the scenes of 2000AD.

But first let’s answer the obvious question: why did 2000AD have an alien editor in the first place?

Readers of weekly comics were not mugs. They knew the life of a new title was not a long one. Why get too attached, especially when new comics bidding for their precious 7 or 8 pence of pocket money appeared on a weekly basis? So anything that could make them feel more loyalty to the comic, that might keep them buying a few precious weeks longer, was worth doing. An editorial figurehead’s job was to set a tone, but also to project reassurance and confidence. The fictional editor could act as the embodiment of a brand, the head of that wider implied community of readers you joined every time you opened an issue.

But there was a less charming reason to have a fake editor, too. DC Thomson’s Warlord was ‘edited’ from its 1974 launch by Lord Peter Flint, aka Codename: Warlord, who was also its lead character. And Flint’s was the only name, staff or creator, that you’d see in an issue of Warlord. The notoriously secretive DC Thomson had a strict no-credits policy. But so did 2000AD for its first few months, and the rest of IPC for a lot longer. The official reason for not offering credit was that the readers didn’t care about such things and would only be confused. The unofficial reasons were that credits would lead writers and artists to make a name for themselves, leading to the unacceptable outcomes of asking for more rights and money or being poached by competitors. (These fears were fully justified, and it serves management right.)

So a fictional editor was a way of stopping readers asking who was actually writing and drawing the stories they enjoyed. On Action and early 2000AD, though, the editorial setup as presented was a lie that hid one truth (the actual creators) but told another. What Pat Mills, Geoff Kemp, Steve McManus, John Wagner, Kelvin Gosnell et al were doing really was something individual, an odd little knot of internal resistance to the IPC norm. The combination of real clubhouse mentality and fake editor created a particular tension, which would have a major impact on 2000AD.

It’s worth taking a quick look at how Action presented itself editorially, though, because it worked very well. They worked hard to create an us-vs-them editorial tone, making readers feel they were part of a gang united against the snobby, repressive or simply boring elements of British life. “Action Man” – a barely anonymised Steve MacManus – was written to his irritation as someone who boozed and partied in between entertaining the readers with stunts. Small boy anathemas like the Bay City Rollers were held up as “Twit Of The Week”. And, in a clever touch, Action’s anti-authoritarian tone extended to the editorial pages: we never heard from the editor himself, only seeing reports via “Action Man” of the unfair treatment meted out by his superior “Ol’ Wooden Leg”.

It all created a sense of intense loyalty to the comic; kids felt like it was on their side. John Sanders’ favourite riposte to critics was to let them open letters at random from the voluminous Action mailbag, knowing every one would be positive.

Any way in which 2000AD could recreate that loyalty was extremely valuable. So the new comic went beyond Action in terms of actually embodying the spirit of the comic in one alien-ish body, pushing the idea of the editorial figurehead harder and further. A lot of the trimmings of Tharg – the concept, the join-our-club alien language, and obviously the look (mostly a gorilla mask painted green, plus ponytail and jumpsuit) – are there right from the beginning. But while he’s a design triumph, what makes Tharg stand out from other fake editors is his attitude. 

Because, given everything we’ve seen about the rest of 2000AD, Tharg presents an obvious conceptual problem. 2000AD prides itself on an anti-heroic, anti-authoritarian streak. An editor, though, is by definition the comic’s resident authority figure, at least as far as readers understand it. When a revived Eagle launched in 1982, it chose to unmask its editor, in line with a somewhat more traditional and sober-minded outlook: David Hunt operated in a space between agony uncle, ringmaster, and referee, taking readers to task when he felt they needed it. That kind of patrician approach would have been absolutely wrong for Tharg, setting the comic’s bubbling bolshiness implicitly against its figurehead. 

Why not keep him offstage, a la Action’s Old Wooden Leg? Their problem was that someone had to introduce the editorial content, and a science fiction comic demanded someone unusual. Later on, Pat Mills would create a character who feels ideally suited to the job of winning over the readers while thumbing his (non-existent) nose at authority, the sewer robot Ro-Jaws. Ro-Jaws did indeed take on a bunch of editorial duties, and maybe if he’d been in the mix sooner, Tharg would never have got the foothold he did. But maybe not: Tharg is a wonderful creation.

IT AIN’T EASY BEING GREEN

Instead, 2000AD carved out a conceptual space for Tharg similar to the one evolving around Dredd. A future cop would have to be an ultimate cop, all the elements of cop-dom exaggerated to ridiculous degree. And a future editor would have to be, well, Tharg, a being of imperial confidence, galactic knowledge, and theatrical pomposity, who was also very clearly a man in a green gorilla mask. Tharg’s addresses to the reader mixed booming pronouncements of the thrill-levels inherent in 2000AD, dismissals of feeble rivals, and nuggets of alien lore. 

“The Mighty One” earned his bombast – 2000AD genuinely was a lot more exciting than the competition, and the creators knew it. But the readers didn’t just have to sit and take Tharg at his word. Tharg’s mission on Earth was constantly threatened and mocked not just by his crew of feckless or mutinous droids but by a readership tacitly encouraged to try and catch him out in their pursuit of the weekly “Galactic Groats” prize.

The result was a comic which gave itself a release valve for both pride and frustration. Feuds with rival publishers could be conducted in the pages of Tharg stories; so could tacit reference to ongoing office politics. The constant image of the droids as put-upon slave labourers masked, but also reflected, a reality where IPC were constantly pushing back on demands for credits and creators rights.

Robot Wars effectively established a tone for Dredd, and a tone for Tharg arrived in strip form only a few weeks later: “Tharg And The Intruder”, a three pager drawn by Kevin O’Neill, in which a snotty young fan of rival “Wonder Comics” gets a tour of the office and finds himself menaced by threats from the stories before getting his brain blown by the unfettered thrill-power of upcoming tales.

The story is a house ad for the then-imminent Future Shocks series, but it nicely sets up Tharg’s personality for future stories, and there are two other reasons to care about it. The first is that it’s an extended look at O’Neill, who was involved with 2000AD from the beginning and became one of the comic’s best-loved artists. Kevin O’Neill was the Assistant Art Editor at the launch of 2000AD, a job which week-on-week seemed to mostly involve applying copious amounts of whitener to pages which crossed the lines of brutality the comic was continually testing. It was he, for instance, who had the thankless task of switching Soviet insignia for Volgan ones when John Sanders changed his mind about the baddies in Invasion!

But O’Neill was an artist himself, contributing art to features, extra pages, and occasional covers (the issue with “Tharg And The Intruder” has a particular gem). O’Neill’s humans were odd, cartoonish, more indebted to humour comic greats like Ken Reid than to the pulpy realism of the “Spanish School”, and indeed his first quasi-serial for 2000AD was the giant monster gag strip Bonjo From Beyond The Stars, which occasionally graced Tharg’s Nerve Centre page and looked like a refugee from Monster Fun or Cor!, except with dodgy ‘ethnic’ jokes.

Where O’Neill really shone, though, and what made him one of 2000AD’s greatest assets, were his monsters and robots. It would take a while for the monsters to really come through, but O’Neill’s robots are on point almost at once – baroque, bristling hunks of machinery, studded with weird angles and weapons and spikes but with a thrilling solidity too. O’Neill robots grind, roll, crush and carve their way across 2000AD’s first decade, and his style arrived almost fully formed: UK indie publisher Dark And Golden reprinted a 1976 fanzine, Mek-Memoirs, full of his already recognisable bots. In “Tharg And The Intruder” O’Neill adds a few of his Meks into ‘Tharg’s Museum’ and, more consequentially, introduces the idea that the comic is written and drawn by robots.

The second interesting thing about the story is that ‘Wonder Comics’ is a very thinly disguised Marvel UK – O’Neill draws an obvious Incredible Hulk on the kid’s T-Shirt – so “Tharg And The Intruder” is a direct challenge to one of its rivals. But what were Marvel Comics up to, and why did Tharg care?

OPPORTUNITIES (LET’S MAKE LOTS OF MONEY)

Tharg’s Marvel UK opposite number at the time was Neil Tennant, the latest in a string of editors who’d run Marvel’s transatlantic branch office. While this was no imperial phase for Marvel UK, Tennant’s tenure was a successful and important one, even if the biggest decisions weren’t his to make. The most crucial one – entirely driven by the New York operation – was the choice to run original stories for the first time in a British Marvel comic, with Captain Britain #1 launching in October 1976. It shared newsagent shelf space with the swastika-dominated final pre-ban issue of Action.

Action and Battle were on Tennant’s mind, as a publisher trying to make an impact against the British weekly big two. He later suggested the short-lived Fury, a repackaging of Marvel’s own war and adventure comics, to tap into that market. Its tempting covers were by IPC’s hottest artists like Carlos Ezquerra, so whether Tennant or another staffer, whoever commissioned them knew their local stuff. But behind the fantastic covers lurked disappointment. Fury exposed the major issues holding Marvel UK strips back from really competing with British material. Marvel’s war comics were entertaining but – to generalise wildly – 60s and early 70s American war comics were Comics Code approved dilutions of the huge steps made by Harvey Kurtzman at EC in the 1950s. In Britain, though, the evolution of war comics was moving in the other direction, with Battle and DC Thomson’s Warlord itching to find new, grittier ways to approach the subject. Marvel’s material was simply tamer than the UK alternative.

Tamer didn’t necessarily mean less sophisticated. The majority of the teens and adults who made up 70s British fandom much preferred American comics to the British ones – 2000AD was the first IPC title to make any kind of cut-through – and that was down to the longer stories creating a much richer canvas for plotting, longer-term characterisation, and more subtle pacing. Did every mid 70s Marvel comic make the best use of these advantages? Certainly not – and frustratingly for the UK repackagers, it was a moment when the most famous titles had the most mediocre stories. The Fantastic Four, Thor, Spider-Man and others were deep in their long post-Stan hangover. A formulaic comic is annoying when it runs to 3 or 4 pages; at 18-20 it becomes insufferable. In America the non-superhero genre books were providing more exciting material, and Marvel UK had tried to pick the best of these – Tomb Of Dracula, Master Of Kung-Fu, Conan – but to mixed commercial results.

So Marvel UK had less exciting stories; their best work didn’t sell; and the characters people knew were in slumps. But even beyond all that, they had significant formal issues to deal with, running colour artwork in black and white, and chopping up monthly stories to suit weekly serialisation. This last was a real blow to the aesthetics of their comics. Great cliffhangers are part of the weekly anthology art, giving you multiple chances to hook readers back for next week. American Marvels put less emphasis on cliffhangers in any case – a month is a long time to bank on readers’ anticipation – and on top of this Marvel UK needed to cut stories in two or three. It found itself trying, and often failing, to find moments of nail-biting drama and tension in stories never written or paced for them.

Captain Britain could have solved these problems – for a while, later, it did. But even in its most competent incarnation – the first handful of issues by Chris Claremont and Herb Trimpe, setting up an origin, a base, a supporting cast – there’s something stodgy and half-hearted about early Captain Britain. He’s too plainly a character constructed according to a template set out 15 years and 3000 miles away. Despite the material being written for the weekly format, its US writers don’t have any better sense of how to pace a weekly serial, with flabby stories lacking momentum. And even the dreariest UK boys’ adventure strip had more sense of place, meaning Captain Britain loses the one great advantage Marvel UK had – the exotic romance of reading American comics – with nothing to replace it.

By the time “Tharg And The Intruder” appeared, Captain Britain was floundering, offering readers such nerve-shredding stories as five issues of Cap trying and failing to beat a radio controlled hawk. 2000AD were happy to put the boot in, with Tharg slating “Wonder Comics” as “primitive entertainment”. But why bother at all? Kelvin Gosnell – by this time the man behind the editorial gorilla mask – must have known Marvel UK had more in their locker than Captain Britain.

While it wouldn’t see print until February 1978 – and I’ll talk about it more in the 1978 write-ups – Marvel UK had the British rights to its American parent’s Star Wars adaptation, a comic which had turned their fortunes around just as the movie was crushing the US Box Office. A 1975 article on the in-production Star Wars was what prompted Gosnell to suggest a science fiction comic in the first place – 2000AD predated Star Wars, but couldn’t have existed without it. And a UK Star Wars comic was the single greatest threat to the Prog’s future success. Shoring up readers’ loyalties via a reminder from Tharg was surely prudent. “Tharg And The Intruder” ends with the boastful Wonder Comics reader a gibbering wreck, sent back to recover from an overdose of thrill power brought on from glimpsing the “Future Shocks” in Tharg’s secret vault. Real readers, the story underlined, were made of sterner stuff.

The irony in all this is that the single most obvious antecedent for Tharg The Mighty and his role comes from Marvel Comics themselves. Tharg’s infinite self-regard, his private jokes and language, and his exasperated relationship with creators are all lifts from Stan Lee’s on-page persona as editor, writer and “Presenter” of Marvel. For outside consumption, Stan The Man created a version of the Marvel Bullpen as a crazy sitcom readers could buy into, play along with and feel part of. Tharg’s Nerve Centre at Kings’ Reach Tower was cut from similar cloth, though with less huckster braggadocio and more patrician pomposity. But Lee’s self-portrait was also a way of hiding a reality where he deserved rather less credit for Marvel’s creativity than he demanded. For all The Mighty One’s usefulness as a safety valve and meta-commentary, the picture his stories painted of the Nerve Centre was just as fictional. As 2000AD became an institution, its staff understood that Tharg concealed as much as he revealed.

One thing Tharg no longer concealed by then was the identities of the people making the comic. Whether it was Kevin O’Neill’s plan when he introduced the creator robots in this Tharg story I don’t know, but the conceit that the comic is being produced by mechanical hands gave him the excuse to smuggle artist, writer and letterer credits into the comic. In Prog 36 readers opening the comic to read new story Inferno saw the first “2000AD Credit Card” telling them who was responsible for it.

It’s hard to overstate what a big deal this was, and there’s some dispute as to whether management just didn’t notice until the credit cards had been running for a few weeks, or whether they actually believed O’Neill’s claim that this was just a joke based on the idea of robots making the comic. Either way, the credits stayed, opening up 2000AD to readers and organised fandom in a way no British comic ever had been. The repercussions of this last to this day. A British comic now existed that people could make their name on.

HOW TO READ IT: “Tharg And The Intruder” is reprinted in The Complete Future Shocks Vol.1, which also contains most of what I’m writing about next time too. As ever, available on the 2000AD webshop.

RECOMMENDED? It’s great fun, though it’s not worth the price of the collection. Most Tharg strips are by nature not built to last but if you get the chance, it’s 3 pages of Kevin O’Neill enjoying himself and that’s always a good time.

NEXT PROG: With this kind of lead-in I’m sure the Future Shocks are going to be brilliant.

WHICH THRILL?: Gigantic polar bear Shako gets unwittingly involved in the Cold War when a secret CIA project gets lodged in his stomach.

ACTION MEN

2000AD has been running for close to 50 years, but there’s been surprisingly little critical movement in that time around its agreed high and low points. We’ve seen a gradual deepening of the appreciation for Judge Dredd as a work of highly perceptive satire – culminating in this year’s Eisner win for Michael Molcher’s excellent I Am The Law, which puts Dredd in conversation with the history of policing and “law and order” politics. There’s also been a much greater appreciation of 2000AD’s place in a wider universe of British comics, with titles like Misty and Scream getting their critical flowers after years mostly forgotten. And of course there’s been the general relief that Rebellion have kept the Prog going, and going to a high standard, so that the nostalgic old bores (me included) don’t have it all their own way.

What there hasn’t been, though, is much of a shift in attitudes to 2000AD’s ‘canon’ of acknowledged classic strips: Dredd, Nemesis, Halo Jones, et al. The canon is additive – you’ll occasionally get a Nikolai Dante, a Zombo or a Brink muscling their way in among the legends – but it’s rare for an older strip to move much beyond readers’ initial verdict. One of the central reasons for doing this blog is that there’s a lot of 2000AD work nobody’s paid critical attention to in years, and it has the potential to put the classics in an interesting light. But I’m not expecting to read Rick Random and come out hailing it as a lost gem.

Over the last couple of years, though, Rebellion have addressed the canon question head-on, with a set of Best Of 2000AD compilations presented as “mixtapes” drawing on the whole 45+ years of 2000AD history, judiciously putting the best of the modern thrills alongside representative jewels from the past in order to say, yes, the new stuff absolutely can hold its own. It was an award-winning success. 

But what’s interesting about the Best Of is that it’s both a conscious attempt to build a modern canon and a sly go at remixing the older one. Yes, Halo and Nemesis are present and correct. And there’s a Judge Dredd in every volume, but a lot of the picks are connoisseurs’ selections like 1983’s “The Graveyard Shift”. But the most extraordinary choice is the oldest comic in the collection, the sole representative of 2000AD’s first year: a sequence of episodes from polar-bear-on-the-rampage story Shako.

If a time traveller from 2024 had shown up in the 2000AD office at the end of 1977 and told them the comic was still going, staff and management would have been floored. But you’d have elicited almost as much disbelief if you’d told them the people printing it thought the high point of their work so far was Shako. Shako is very short (the strip; the bear is a whopper) and even so wasn’t reprinted in full until 2006. It’s barely science fiction – the one SF element is a MacGuffin the story has completely forgotten about by the end. Below the surface it’s a retread of the themes of Hook Jaw – man against nature, with nature represented by an apex predator in its natural environment – and Flesh – a story of a mighty beast fighting back against destructive colonisers. And on the surface it’s a victim-of-the-week schlockfest.

But Rebellion aren’t reprinting this to be ironic, or even just as a broad example of What 2000AD Used To Be Like (though it works well as that). Shako is brilliant. It finds a new, darkly comic voice for 2000AD which we’ll see again and again, even if it’s rarely as crude or gonzo as this. And I’d argue it represents a break from, even a laying to rest of, 2000AD’s main influence, the comic I’ve mentioned in almost every one of these write ups: Action.

Action’s story has been told almost more often than 2000AD’s, first and still best in Martin Barker’s Action: The Story Of A Violent Comic. Barker told the story of how Pat Mills, and co-conspirators like editor Geoff Kemp and writers John Wagner and Ken Armstrong, concocted a comic that suited its febrile, aggressive times, lifting wantonly from TV and films to create stories young readers would relate to in ways rival comics couldn’t touch. Launched in February 1976, Action is very clear about its loyalty to its readers and their lives – “REMEMBER”, read messages at the bottom of the page, “ACTION IS ON YOUR SIDE”.

The comic drew adverse attention almost immediately. Action was pilloried in the national press, and as its contents got even hotter and more controversial, IPCs John Sanders faced a grilling on National TV after the notorious “Kids Rule OK” cover seemed to show a fallen policeman cowering from a chain-wielding hooligan, and weeks later the comic was withdrawn from sale without consulting Sanders; it returned in December 1976 in painfully diluted form. 

Action was hardly alone. Outrage and distress over violent media – particularly for children – was on the rise. Weeks after the final pre-clampdown issue of Action (cover tagline: “COMMIT SUICIDE”) was pulped, Mary Whitehouse of the National Viewers and Listeners Association complained about an episode of Doctor Who and was heard, a link in a chain of events which ended in producer Philip Hinchcliffe leaving the job. Weeks after that, the Sex Pistols swore at Bill Grundy and the country exploded in highly mediated anger around punk rock. A comic like 2000AD launching in early 1977 was entering a very different media environment than Action a year earlier.

Thanks mostly to Martin Barker, the story of Action is very familiar. But for all the intense loyalty of its horde of readers, Action was little noticed by any wider comics public. There’s no discussion of Action, or the scandal around it, in contemporary fanzines, and when Pat Mills mentions the controversy, and Action’s emasculation, to a fanzine five years later, the interviewer, well versed in 2000AD, had no idea its predecessor even existed.

Barker’s book brought Action back to prominence and established its legend, and the generous quantities of strips he reprinted gave readers a valuable sense of what the comic was like. To actually read Action, though, is to experience a comic that’s rather different from the all-mayhem, boundary-busting title you might have read about. It somehow is both less and more extreme than you’re expecting.

The best of early Action – Hook Jaw, Fugitive-style thriller The Running Man, and particularly hardman secret agent Dredger – still crackles with confidence and aggression, balanced with the skill to make the stories hit over just 3 or 4 pages. Pat Mills described later how difficult writing Dredger was – done-in-one action thrillers which had to crank through backstories, antagonists and twists with merciless efficiency. But the work shows – I came to Dredger, my favourite Action strip, after reading the similar MACH 1 and was floored by its sophistication in comparison, the tautness of the stories and the level of imagination with which Dredger handles each deathtrap and double-cross. And yes, the strip involves startling levels of violence, presented with a sadism which early 2000AD mostly avoided. By Action issue 3 we have a wince-inducing opening panel where Dredger is being tortured in a dentist chair, for instance. In an example of the plotting and twists the series delighted in, he’s letting himself be tortured to draw suspicion from a double agent, who he ends up shooting anyway.

But elsewhere Action is very much an ordinary comic. The shock value of Hellmann Of Hammer Force – a war comic with a German hero – wears off quickly and it’s mostly interesting for how much the story contorts itself to reassure you that while Hellmann is racing through France at the head of the Nazi war machine he doesn’t, you know, agree with it or anything. Other stories are routine, feeling a decade out of date next to the fresher material, though one of the reasons Action impresses is how ruthless and shrewd it is about identifying and purging weaker features – lifeless sports blackmail story Play Til You Drop and the soporific Coffin Sub are gone within a few months, to be replaced by strips more in line with Action’s two-fisted brio.

One was Death Game 1999, a Rollerball crib that’s an obvious Harlem Heroes ancestor and Action’s only attempt at science fiction. When you look at Action as a 2000AD predecessor, it’s worth thinking about the other elements Mills and company carried over to the new title and the ones they left alone. MACH 1, as mentioned, is very Dredger-influenced, but Bill Savage’s team-up with Peter Silk also echoes Dredger’s relationship with Eton-educated Simon Breed. The bloody rivalries of the men trying to hunt Hook Jaw recur in the uneasy alliance of Regan and Carver in Flesh. But Dan Dare owes little to Action, and Dredd is a knowing inversion of its anti-authoritarian streak – who could object to post-apocalyptic brutality when it’s done by the police?

But some parts of Action don’t travel to the new launch. The streak of up-yours social realism that animates Action doesn’t cross over – the greasers, petty crooks, gangs and skins who sometimes hassle but sometimes support the protagonists all melt away in early 2000AD, and it’s years before we see much like them. Even more than the violence, that shift in tone is the big difference, suggesting to me that it was the sheer bolshiness of Action that put the wind up the establishment, as much as any of the red ink sloshing around. And it’s a shame to lose it – those parts, on show in strips like Sport’s Not For Losers and Look Out For Lefty, are where Action is at its funniest.

GRRR-INDSET MENTALITY

The idea that Shako is a break from the Action legacy may seem a very odd claim to make, as the story is obviously conceived as an equivalent to Action’s main attraction, the monstrous killer shark Hook Jaw. In the first 2000AD Annual, released while Shako was still running in the prog, the bear gets an origin story, “White Fury”, which positions it very much in the spirit of the great white. Shako is a creature driven by instinct and urges but also by hatred of the humans who slay his mate and cubs, and a preternatural cunning which allows him to pull off quite astonishing stunts. In “White Fury” he manages to casually sink an entire ship before swimming off.

But the way in which Shako is able to move on from Action is in finding a way to recapture the biggest thing left behind when 2000AD launched – Action’s dark streak of humour – and make it work in the new comic’s context. The first four episodes of Shako itself are by John Wagner and Pat Mills, working off a concept Mills created for the original dummy issue of 2000AD. They introduce a very familiar set of characters – CIA agent “Foul Mouth” Falmouth, a take-no-prisoners tough guy, who’s working with the calmer, more ethical Buck Dollar, a “half-Eskimo ecologist” to bring down the rampaging Shako. To complete the Jaws triangle of authority figure, scientist, and wild man we briefly also get a drunken sailor, who, like almost all the named characters, winds up meeting his end at Shako’s jaws, though not before he’s got the polar bear drunk.

Already this feels like a more cynical speedrun through the Flesh and Hook Jaw playbook – Falmouth is written as a gibbering maniac, and you don’t call a character Buck Dollar if you’re taking matters completely seriously. And it’s very apparent, very quickly, why Shako missed the cut for the original line-up: the premise is unsustainably bananas. Corporate cowboys versus Tyrannosaurs feels like a fair man against nature fight; the might of the US military and intelligence services versus one polar bear does not, and to make it one you have to make the humans hunting Shako into the most astonishing bunch of idiots. Which Wagner, very happily, does.

This is at the heart of why Shako was seen as, at best, a weird, forgotten mis-step until about 20 years ago, when adult fans rediscovered it and realised they were reading a classic. For all Mills’ dedicated and useful research on the habits of polar bears, as a concept Shako feels too simple: Hook Jaw except it’s a bear, so what? And because Shako was by early 2000AD standards very short, and because it was hardly reprinted, that concept is all people really had to go on: in nostalgia terms it ranked somewhere below Ant Wars. But reading Shako it’s immediately obvious that everyone involved, most especially John Wagner, knows exactly what they’re dealing with. The most famous Shako anecdote is that when Wagner handed in the script, its opening line was “Christ! Look at the size of that fucking bear”. On one level Shako is ridiculous, and Wagner knew it.

But Shako is never pitched as an outright comedy strip, and it wouldn’t be as good if it was. It’s a revenge saga which is also a comment on cold war politics, with Americans blundering and slaughtering their way across a wilderness that was doing just fine without them. But it’s also full of very funny moments: it’s a Millsian theme told with Wagnerian (no, not that Wagnerian) comic relish. Before its rediscovery it was dismissed as a poor retread of Flesh and Hook Jaw, when if anything it’s a satire of the previous stories. Or perhaps more accurately, Flesh treats its man vs nature theme as hubristic tragedy; Shako repeats it as farce.

You can see this most obviously when you compare the sequences in each story where the central monster rampages through the humans’ base. In Flesh, the siege of the Trans-Time base is the climax of the story, ramped up to for weeks and played for thrills, scares and big symbolic moments. In Shako, the bear’s assault on the Ice Station community is full of slapstick and black humour, like the scene – good enough that Wagner riffed on it in an early Judge Death story – where the base commander, written as a Southern hick, gropes his way out of the shower and compliments his wife on an unusually soft towel. What the reader knows and he does not is that really it’s Shako’s pelt.

The scene is drawn by Flesh and Hook Jaw veteran Ramon Sola, the go-to artist for death-by-creature, though most of Shako is drawn by the more placid Juan Arancio (who does do a satisfyingly chonky bear). Sola gives us a twisted, brilliant image of the hapless, naked commander being torn to actual ribbons while helpfully telling us “He’s ripping me to shreds!”. This is a favourite trick of Wagner’s, heightening the grotesquerie by having Shako’s victims narrate their own horrific demise, usually to no other character, like a pantomime actor addressing the audience. Sola’s wild, expressionist mayhem aside, most of Shako’s art is not actually very bloodthirsty, so this technique is a way to emphasise the violence in Shako. But it’s also inherently absurd.

And it has to be. For all that Hook Jaw and Flesh are both classics, there are barriers to making the Jaws-style killer-animal subgenre work well as a comic for kids. Jaws gets its power from the control film has over pacing and shock, as well as from the gory violence. The control is lost in the transition between mediums – weekly comics have the blunt-force tension-generator of the cliffhanger, but it’s hardly the same as a well-executed jump scare. The gore was preserved in Hook Jaw via its position in Action’s full-colour centre spread, allowing copious amounts of red ink to titillate the reader. 

But 2000AD doesn’t have that luxury, and besides can’t risk the same kind of publicity Action’s violence generated. Without shocks and blood, killer-beast stories are toothless. Mills finds a way around that with Flesh, by creating an actual plot and a world to frame his hungry Tyrannosaurs, letting him oversee the strip as a single, accelerating story. Wagner in Shako finds what’s probably the only other way to do one in early 2000AD – write it as ultra-dark comedy which takes the bits everyone already knows, like the obsessed human protagonist, and presents them in as over-the-top a way as possible.

Wagner’s first solo credit on the strip is part 5. This is the episode with the unsurpassable tagline, “The only BEAR on the CIA DEATH LIST”, but it’s also the episode where Shako spends his time chasing a CIA agent and biting all his clothes off one by one, while Falmouth gets chased in turn by a version of Nurse Ratchet from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and ends up getting an injection from a massive syringe in his bare bum. Illustrating this is Italian artist Doggerio, whose rendering is by early 2000AD standards subtle and delicate, and really hampered only by how very weird his bears look. Which would be a problem if he was the regular artist, but actually works to emphasise how strange the story you’re reading is.

It surely wasn’t obvious at the time, but this episode, less than six months into the comic’s life, is where the original style of 2000AD – what I’ve been calling “Sweeney-Fi”, working-class tough guy adventure with a SF spin – starts to make way for something new. We know from Flesh that the real protagonist of a creature strip is the creature, but in Flesh there’s an effort made to give Old One Eye a Millsian counterpoint in Earl Reagan, the hard man out on the frontlines who understands the threat and is willing to take his bosses on to deal with it. Falmouth is in that narrative position in Shako, but Wagner takes every opportunity to make him look a fool, constantly sparring with his ambitious (though equally incompetent) second in command Dobie.

Buck Dollar, the ecologist, behaves more reasonably – and as the guy sympathetic to nature you’d expect the strip to take his side – but his actual actions are shown to be disastrous until the very end: without his plan to capture the “magnificent specimen” Shako and release him alive, Falmouth would have his capsule and the story would be over in three weeks. Dollar and the other Inuit characters in the story are better able to understand and deal with Shako than the Americans, but Wagner doesn’t completely buy into the “native wisdom” stereotype either. The final episode of Shako makes great play of Buck Dollar hunting Shako the traditional way, with ceremonial robes and a war cry – it fails to kill him, and the mortally wounded Dollar eventually has to use an enormous bazooka.

Tragedy vs Farce: in Flesh, man loses because we underestimate the power of nature. In Shako, man loses because we are thick as shit. It’s not yet apparent in the way he writes Judge Dredd, but for all that John Wagner is extremely good at writing superhumanly tough characters, he has a very clear-eyed view of the limits of toughness, and it’s on display in Shako.

What we’re seeing here becomes, for a long time, the dominant tone of 2000AD – a mix of visceral, over-the-top action and black, cynical humour. It works better when it’s allied to wilder sci-fi concepts, as in Wagner’s work on Dredd and later Strontium Dog, but early on 2000AD doesn’t have many of those, so we see it here, taking a tough-guy versus animal strip and twisting it into something truly surreal. In the 2000AD style, the humour and the action intensify each other, creating the sense you’re in on something subversive, something you can’t quite believe they’re getting away with.

It takes a while longer for this nasty, funny tone to show up in the Prog regularly, but once it does it becomes the style most associated with “Golden Age” 2000AD. And alongside Dredd, Shako is where it starts. Or at least, the first half of Shako; there are only so many episodes you can squeeze out of people failing to kill a big bear, and while the later parts of Shako, involving a tussle with the KGB, are entertaining, when Buck Dollar and Shako have their final showdown it doesn’t feel premature.  

“Shako died well!” – and with him ends the Action era of 2000AD, where the comic exists as a continuation of that earlier project, even if that wasn’t obvious to fans. What I’ve been calling the Sweeney-Fi style was vital to the early concept and success of the Prog, though, and it never disappears entirely. The tough-guy anti-authoritarian streak is in the comic’s DNA, mutating and recurring across genres and eras. We’ll keep seeing strips for a while with contemporary or very near future settings, which Sweeney-Fi works best in, but it’s several years before we get another that stands as a high point for the comic. By the end of 1977, the most successful parts of 2000AD feel increasingly distant from the stories in Prog 1. 

Whatever its successes as a style, though, Sweeney-Fi was vital as a way of bridging the gap between what Mills and others had done on Battle and Action and what 2000AD became. In a world where SF was a potential coming trend rather than a sure thing, that bridge reflected where readers (and IPC management) were. But it’s fitting that it’s Shako, the strip most obviously indebted to Action, that begins to call time on its way of doing things.

HOW TO READ IT: After a few reprints in magazines and collections Shako got its own full reprint in 2012, and I believe it’s still available on the 2000AD webshop.

RECOMMENDED? Yes! At least if you like Flesh. Even if you don’t agree with my wider arguments for its significance, it’s worth checking this early cult classic out.

NEXT PROG: Who has been bringing us all these thrills? Why – it’s Tharg The Mighty, and now he gets to star in a story of his own.

This is part of Discourse 2000, a story-by-story look at the weekly 2000AD comic. Expect spoilers for stories covered!

WHICH THRILL? In the year 2099, due process is a thing of the past. Judge Dredd dispenses instant justice on the streets of the vast Mega-City One.

BIG SIX

2000AD’s sixth regular strip was held over from the launch issue, giving the other five room to introduce themselves and allowing Prog 1 to include a teaser. Some later retellings – helped by the kind glow of hindsight – cast this decision as a display of confidence. It seems likely that some of the struggles Pat Mills had in bringing Judge Dredd to the page played a part too. The only story in the early line-up Mills had developed rather than created, Judge Dredd was an editorial headache. Both the strip’s creators, John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, had temporarily walked away from the new comic, Wagner after an apparent IPC promise of greater creator rights had been pulled.

The origin of Judge Dredd is full of stories told and told again. Wagner borrowing a name from an abortive Mills horror strip; Ezquerra’s initial art with its outrageous full-page cityscape; Wagner’s horrified “he looks like a fucking Spanish pirate” on seeing the character design; and so on. It’s the most retold story in 2000AD history, perhaps after the origin of the comic itself. And why not? This is Judge Dredd we’re talking about, the most recognisable British comics character of the last 50 years (if not ever), and more than anything else the reason 2000AD survived.

But Dredd was also the odd story out, the one hardest to square with Mills’ working-class/anti-authoritarian vision for the comic, and full of difficult initial decisions. Most prominently, how much of a bastard was Dredd going to be? The prototype strip has him executing surrendered perps in the street and shooting a fleeing jaywalker in the back. Whether this was too anti-heroic or just too violent, Mills demurred. As published, Dredd is tough but gives at least the illusion of fairness.

Wagner was back as regular writer within a couple of months, but the first year of Dredd is still often scrappy and episodic, with the same abruptness and inconsistency as MACH 1 – initially at least, a much more popular story. It’s also often magnificent, and it’s very little like any later version of Dredd I’ll write about.

Wagner’s earlier strip for Valiant, One Eyed Jack, is cited as a kind of Dredd prototype, and actually fits the Millsian hero template better than Dredd seems to. But aside from being a series about the toughest cop in the world, Dredd and One-Eyed Jack don’t have a lot in common, and the differences are richer than the similarities. The basic difference is that Jack is the most interesting thing in the One-Eyed Jack world, a low-veracity take on contemporary New York. One-Eyed Jack was an entertaining strip but a more faithful crib from Dirty Harry than Dredd is: tales of a rule-bending lone wolf hardman who criminals fear because they know he’ll cross any line that’s put in front of him. Original or not, he’s a strong lead. The action in a One-Eyed Jack story focuses on how Jack will deal with whatever violent situation he finds himself in, not on the situations themselves, and with only three pages to play with each issue, both situations and solutions tend to be rudimentary. 

Early Dredd is occasionally like this too. A strip like “Mugger’s Moon” – by Gerry Finley-Day, not Wagner – is in every particular a 6-page One Eyed Jack story. Judge Dredd chases and guns down some muggers, and blows up the taxi of a cabbie who abandoned one of their victims. Its sole point is that Dredd is tough as nails, violent and ruthless, and he needs to be to deal with the scum he’s up against. But Dredd is the focus, not the city or the situations it throws at him: there’s nothing interesting about mugging.

If all Dredd stories were like this, the strip wouldn’t have topped the popularity charts. It might not have lasted six months. The fact they’re not all like this is down to that difference with One-Eyed Jack: Jack is more interesting than his world, Dredd is the other way around. He’s the epitome of a Judge, the best and most competent cop in his city, but unlike Jack he’s not a rule-bender; he exists in a police state in which all rules come pre-bent. At this stage there’s no tension between what Dredd himself wants and what the Law and his bosses require of him.

In theory this makes the strip less exciting – you’re stripping out one of the main sources of drama in the typical police story. That means Wagner has to find something to replace it with. So the first few years of Dredd find the strip constantly pulling in two subtly different directions. One is to make Dredd more interesting – fleshing out his backstory, giving him a supporting cast. The other is to make his world more interesting. And for a long time, the second gives the bigger payoffs. There is not a lot of variety in Dredd’s response to various situations – even the best 1977 Dredd stories, like the multi-part “Robot Wars”, are generally about getting him in position to arrest the problem, or shoot it. So writing Dredd becomes about finding interesting problems for him to arrest or shoot, and the writers realise quickly that the wilder or even goofier that stuff is, the better the stories get.

Repeatedly in Dredd’s first year, you keep bumping into episodes which feel like Judge Dredd stories will regularly feel in future; stories which read like the creators hitting a target they might not have realised existed until they did. The first story to do this is very early – “Krong”, in Prog 5, where Malcolm Shaw finds weird things to bounce off Dredd (a holodeck-style artificial environment; giant Androids of movie monsters) and knits them together into a rudimentary plot he can let Dredd loose on. It’s not a classic, but it’s immediately a mode Judge Dredd works well in – a ramrod-straight protagonist in a lunatic world.

On the other side of the ledger, it introduces Dredd’s first regular supporting character, his “Italian cleaning lady”, Maria, one of a slew of nagging or domineering older women in early 2000AD. Either some of the creators had mother issues or, more cynically, they knew some readers did. Maria (and, imminently, Walter) are comic relief hedges against a one-note lead character: with hindsight they feel like crutches but they’re an integral part of how the early Dredd works.

Twenty progs later, out the other side of “Robot Wars”, we get another example – Wagner and Ian Gibson’s “You Bet Your Life”, about an illegal game show in which hapless citizens are murdered if they can’t answer the questions. This is a foundational story, because the highly jaundiced view of Mega City One’s citizens which snaps into place here becomes a baseline for years. Dredd is saving the citizens, not just from predatory crims, but from the situations their own desperation and stupidity gets them into.

The story is played mostly for laughs, as of all the Dredd artists Gibson has the most early flair for designing hapless civilians, goofy robots and weirdo perps (though he can also, as his blazing ‘Robot Wars’ episodes show, deliver on the action front). Wagner has zero interest in earning your sympathy for the thick-as-munce citizen Dredd rescues – he’s a fool who’s led his entire family to their doom, and presumably he’s plonked back into his wretched life straight after the story ends. The point is, again, that Mega-City One is a demented environment in which anything might happen. Within six months of 2000AD’s launch, the future city is easily the most interesting thing about the whole comic.

A lot of Dredd’s later history in the comic will be about the slow unwinding of the ideas these early stories set up. We will get more focus on Dredd as a person. We will see wedges between Dredd, the Justice Department he serves, and eventually the Law he embodies. We will also see a broader range of Mega-City One citizens, and learn to view them as people, not just punchlines. The early Dredd tropes turn out over the medium-term to box creators in, and need to be undermined. But nobody in 1977 was thinking about making Dredd work a decade out. and these early ideas are also the things that ensure the strip’s survival and dominance early on. They let Dredd work harder than anything to establish 2000AD as a home for not just action, but dark comedy.

WE ARE DANCING MECHANIK

It’s Wagner himself who first brings to the page the most important implication of the Dredd set-up. It’s clear within a few episodes that Judge Dredd is a narrative inevitability; he’s always going to triumph over the problem, and his triumph is always likely to involve the maximum force of the law. The interest is in creating situations and letting him loose on them. OK, you might say, how does that make him any different from Bill Savage or John Probe, who are also clearly going to win any fight they’re in? What Wagner understood from the start is that Dredd does not need to be heroic: he works as an inevitable force against sympathetic situations as well as evil ones. As a character he is closer to Hook Jaw the shark than to One Eyed Jack.

The ways this works aren’t fully apparent yet, but Wagner gets to the essential ambiguity, the moral slipperiness, of Dredd stories right away with “Robot Wars”, which marks the moment Dredd overtakes MACH 1 in the reader surveys. Most critics of early Dredd rightly call out Robot Wars as a high point and take note of the way the story plays with the reader’s sympathies. Robots are explicitly slaves, treated atrociously by their human masters, and robot leader Call-Me-Kenneth’s call to liberation is hard not to sympathise with. But within a few weeks, C-M-K’s robot revolution takes a darker turn – the robot leader inflicts brutal punishments on his own followers and sets himself up as a dictator, complete with a warm endorsement of Hitler. By the end of the story, the revolution is over, and the handful of robots who helped Dredd get rewarded with a “pleasure circuit”, to the envy of their metal brethren.

What’s going on here? “Robot Wars” invites you to feel sympathy for the put-upon robots, then makes it clear that robot independence, at least under their charismatic war leader, will mean slaughter of the “fleshy ones” but also tyranny for robots, and ends with the status quo essentially restored. Only one robot is actually freed in Robot Wars – Dredd’s lisping servo-robot Walter – and he doesn’t want it: all the others remain slaves. So the story flips from robots as sympathetic, to robots as a terrifying insurgency, to a barbed victory which reminds readers of the initial injustice. The fixed point is Dredd, the essential narrative force, who sees robot trouble coming, is equally hard on Call-Me-Kenneth as messiah and as dictator, and ends the story presumably well aware none of the underlying problems have been solved.

If some of the one-off Dredd stories do solid work getting the setting right, Robot Wars is where Wagner starts to get the tone he’ll use for Dredd – satire and comedy so dark it’s almost nihilistic. Dredd is an unstoppable force, but the justice he represents is seen for the first time to be profoundly unjust – robots really are an oppressed, slave population. At the same time Call-Me-Kenneth’s heel turn towards outright monstrosity leaves the reader firmly on Dredd’s side by the story’s climax. Dredd is a fascist: the threats he fights are worse. This is, naturally, the way real fascists justify themselves too. Wagner doesn’t shy away from acknowledging Dredd’s own monstrosity, but it’s very rarely the focus of the strip at this point, or really for years to come.

Just as important to future Dredd as the story of Robot Wars is the way Wagner tells it. There’s excitement and peril and as much action as Dredd’s early artists can deliver on low-grade paper. Ian Gibson brings the best sequences, with a raw, kinetic style that’s a long way from the sensuous, fluid lines he became famous for later. But even as the tempo of the action rises, the death-dealing robots in Call-Me-Kenneth’s army are continually singing and chanting ridiculous songs. 

What prevents Dredd being just a bootboy fantasy of state violence? In the end, it’s not any narrative content or explicit messaging – it’s this constant absurdity Wagner leavens his Dredd with. Making silliness – and tone in general – your prophylactic against fascists taking your strip seriously is a risky strategy, and over the years some unpleasant people have loved Dredd for its instant, boot- and stick-based, justice. But Wagner’s genius is partly his very fine sense of how far to take things, and how to balance the setting, the protagonist and the tone to make a strip that can fascinate, thrill, and horrify. 

Robot Wars is a good example of why Pat Mills’ instincts were right about a sci-fi comic allowing for stories – and violence – a contemporary paper like Action could never get away with. For the judges to crush an uprising by a real-world minority, however awful their leader, would be unthinkable as a boys’ adventure storyline in 1977. But if one happened in Mega-City One, of course that’s what Judge Dredd is going to do to it. Making the oppressed population robots allows Wagner to do that story, keep Dredd as an action hero, and still leave the story with an ending which goes out of its way to remind us how shabby conditions for the robots still are.

FAMILY AFFAIR

Wagner’s, though, is not the only way to write Dredd, especially not at this early stage. Pat Mills’ “The Return Of Rico” in Prog 30 takes Wagner’s character and finds a completely new tone for him. It’s a story which puts the spotlight on Dredd as a person for the first time, without losing any of his granite toughness. It’s common – and accurate – to point up how much lore Mills adds to Dredd’s background in six extraordinary pages: clone Judges, the prison world of Titan, Rico Dredd himself. And how he finds shade in Dredd’s one-dimensionality – “The Return Of Rico” implies motivation and interiority for the character, a drive to prove himself after his identical clone went bad, without having to spell it out. 

But for me the most important thing the story does is explore a different angle on the idea that Dredd, and his obsessive pursuit of the Law, is an unstoppable force in the narrative. We’ve seen it applied to the villainous, and less often to the sympathetic: here Mills turns that force on Dredd himself, creating a different kind of Dredd story, one in which that narrative inevitability creates immense personal cost for the character. If Dredd can kill his own brother, there’s really nothing he won’t do for the Law; but if there’s nothing he won’t do for the Law, then some of his actions may have terrible consequences for him.

Having seen Pat Mills handle Dredd, let’s step back and ask the question directly – how does this strip fit with the rest of the comic Mills created? Through these posts I’ve been talking about the early tone of 2000AD as ‘Sweeney-Fi’ – a comic centering on hard bastards with a prickly relationship with the authorities they’re theoretically answering to, and strips that give kids the same immediate thrills as the most exciting (or forbidden) adult TV and films, but with a science-fiction twist.

Judge Dredd is in one way the apotheosis of Sweeney-Fi – he’s the coolest, hardest bastard in the comic, and even early on his world is doing the science fiction thing of extrapolating and exploring. But he’s also a break from it – Dredd is authority manifest, and his relationship with the powers that be in Mega-City One is almost always cordial. There are stray moments when it’s suggested Dredd is a man of unorthodox methods, and an odd sequence in “Robot Wars” where he flounces away from the Judges only to return the next episode (the city’s Robot policy is one of his consistent areas of disagreement). But by “The Return Of Rico” it’s explicit – what defines Dredd is his devotion to the Law; we’ve seen what would happen if he lost that.

So Dredd can have the toughness of a Sweeney-Fi hero like John Probe, and the stories can give fun futuristic jolts, but he can never have the attitude of one. Except that’s not quite the end of it – we’re going to continually get temporary status quo shifts which will put Dredd into that rebellious, lone wolf role. He won’t change, but his environment will.

“The Return Of Rico” isn’t just a triumph for Mills – it’s tremendous work from artist Mike McMahon. Compare McMahon’s drawing of Rico’s unmasked face to how Dave Gibbons drew Artie Gruber in Harlem Heroes, another deformed cyborg. Both are glorious, memorable illustrations. But Gruber’s appearances were an invitation to the reader to drink in every clear-lined detail of his grotesque villainy; to enjoy his company, in fact, as a regular menace for the team. Rico is something quite different – a shock of rapid lines outlining a battered, horribly deconstructed face, with the viewer’s attention drawn to the beady fury of his eyes. It’s an image that suggests all of Rico’s punishment and all of his hatred, one meant to make the reader flinch along with Dredd.

McMahon was the youngest of the group of up-and-coming British artists who would define the visual look of 2000AD. And he was the most raw – his early Dredd stories were his first professional work, straight out of art college. He didn’t even have the fanzine background Kevin O’Neill did, and he certainly didn’t have the underground and commercial experience of Gibbons or Brian Bolland. Some of the wonder of McMahon is how we get to see him develop on the page, working out the idiosyncratic angles, perspectives and compositional tricks that make him immediately recognisable, even as his pencilling and inking techniques shift radically. While his contemporaries settled into a mature style quickly, McMahon stayed restless, dropping out of artistic rotation several times only to return months later with a freshly mutated style. In his rare interviews he comes across as his own toughest critic, and probably too humble (unusual in the 2000AD creative line-up!) while his peers and younger artists are in awe of what he could achieve.

McMahon’s greatest work is well ahead of him – his earliest Dredd (the first story to see print, in fact) is done in requested imitation of Carlos Ezquerra, Dredd’s co-creator, who had been tempted away from his creation by the chance to do another co-created strip, Battle’s short-run American Civil War story El Mestizo. McMahon’s art is somehow more Ezquerra than Ezquerra – while the black leather and gold metal uniform is Ezquerra consciously designing a future fascist biker type, it’s McMahon in the earliest Progs who sexes Dredd up, drawing him as lean, young and sensual, with slender limbs and a sneering, full mouth. The only other artist who leant as hard into the Dredd world’s leather, subcultural look is Bill Ward, a veteran of gay fetish illustration who drew an incendiary first episode of biker story “The Mega-City 5000” before being immediately upstaged by Brian Bolland’s Dredd debut in the second.

Bolland’s version of Dredd was heavily inspired by McMahon’s – at this point the strip’s various artists seemed to be in a kind of feedback loop of inspiration. McMahon’s evolution away from the Ezquerra template involved making Dredd more impressionistic, going big on the less functional, more symbolic parts of the design: McMahon’s classic Dredd has the most impractically colossal boots, which work brilliantly as a reminder of his cartoonish, extreme violence and the strip’s commitment to constant action and motion. Bolland took the unreal solidity of McMahon Dredd and gave it gorgeous, deep, almost tangible texture, thanks to a heavy inking and cross-hatching style he’d developed via working on underground comics, in British fanzines, and with Gibbons on Nigeria’s Powerman. A lot of this work had something important in common with 2000AD: the paper quality was atrocious, and Bolland’s style was partly a way of coping with printing that could wipe out nuance.

Bolland’s art looked luxurious, his luridly coloured centre-spreads rival Belardinelli’s Dan Dare ones for wow-factor, and his arrival alongside McMahon and Gibson meant that the most popular strip in the comic had the best, freshest art. Readers went crazy for him. But even with Bolland in place, the world and story of Dredd was still restless. Most of the early Bolland strips are part of Dredd’s second extended story sequence, a sojourn in Luna-City on the moon where Dredd takes up the rotating post of Judge-Marshal. The Luna-City sequence is an epic that isn’t, both in structure – it’s a meandering, episodic set of stories that mostly happen to be set on the moon – and in fan appreciation. While individual parts are fondly regarded, nobody seems to rate the arc as a whole.

EVERYONE’S GONE TO THE MOON

Dredd’s move to Luna-City comes in the context of a number of shake-ups in 2000AD strips towards the end of 1977, in the wake of Pat Mills handing over the editorial position to Kelvin Gosnell and Gosnell’s fannish, enthusiastic young assistant Nick Landau. The new team shifted the comic further away from the Prog 1 ‘Sweeney-Fi’ model and towards something less down-to-earth. Harlem Heroes transitioned to the more violent Inferno; Dan Dare got a redesign and a new, more Star Wars inspired direction; MACH 1 flipped from mission-of-the-week stories to darker internal conflicts. But on the surface Dredd didn’t need a do-over. He was the breakout star of the comic, and a showcase for the up-and-coming set of British artists helping define its look. Why pull him out of Mega-City One and send him up to the moon for several months?

I don’t know if this was John Wagner’s (or editorial’s) intention, but taking Dredd away from the city helped him firm up as a character. We’d seen Dredd in what would end up his most typical role – the face of the judge system; a particularly prominent part of a regime and a machine, but a part nonetheless. What Luna-City and the next two long stories did was put the focus on Dredd as an individual. In Luna-City he’s part of a system he doesn’t initially understand, one it’s quickly established resents his presence. In “The Cursed Earth” he’s thrown into an extreme environment without the city’s resources; and in “The Day The Law Died” he’s up against the city itself in a corrupted state. We’ll dig into those in the 1978 posts, but ultimately we have over a year of stories where Dredd is mostly the centre, and where Dredd knows little more than the readers do about the weird shit he’s facing.

For all the strip’s massive early success – and it is clearly the best thing in 2000AD by the end of 1977 – it’s easy to see why this was a good idea on paper. Wagner and company weren’t running out of ideas, but they’d cycled quickly through the most obvious things to do with a cop character – bent colleagues; a rookie; some tragic backstory. And while the Mega-City setting was starting to show its potential, too many stories just put a vague futuristic gloss on existing crime tropes. There’s the germ of the notion that this setting is a great one for contemporary satire, but beyond the ever-faithful “what if legal thing now is illegal in future?” story type none of the stories are quite hitting it yet. And the writing is still hazy about what makes Mega City One any more distinctive than just “New York in the future”.

So you have a character who works as a narrative inevitability for situations to bounce off; the character is a smash, but the situations aren’t always sparking. One answer is to put him in stories where the situations aren’t just wilder, but where that inevitability can be tested, where Judge Dredd’s status as an avatar of authority might be in question.

Over the next 15 months Wagner and Pat Mills will run through various takes on how to do that, but for Luna-City the idea is pretty simple: Judge Dredd as a future Western. The Moon is frontier territory, and Dredd is the new Sheriff in town, complete with a doubtfully loyal deputy, gunslinger droids and a “Gravity Boot-Hill”. ]

At first sight Western iconography and storytelling is as firmly in Sweeney-Fi territory as the ‘future cop’ set-up – the tough guys kids know from the telly, but with an SF twist. We’ve already seen Pat Mills use Western tropes in Flesh to add weight to his colonial metaphor, and the way early 2000AD latches onto the very Western-esque term “lawman” for Dredd shows how natural a fit he is. But there’s also a difference between Westerns and the other 2000AD source material. The Sweeney and The Six Million Dollar Man are the shows kids watched by choice (or longed to be allowed to watch). Westerns, in 1970s Britain, were what was on when nothing else was: unfashionable imports which filled TV schedules.

Every reader knew what was happening when Dredd faced a quick-draw robot, but this was a situation ripe for exaggeration, piss-taking and subversion in a way the spies, cops and sports stories weren’t. Which suited Wagner’s style very nicely indeed, and the first thing he does is have Walter The Wobot stow away on the Lunar shuttle as a commentator on the action. If you want readers to take the ornery folks of Luna-1 seriously as a threat, you don’t introduce them with Walter saying “they seem a wuff bweed”.

As well as being a chance for Wagner to get Dredd into a situation where he’s a lone lawman, more reliant on his wits than on the system, the Luna-City story is the peak of Walter’s involvement in the strip as Dredd’s main supporting character. He doesn’t disappear after this – he’ll keep popping up, and in 1978 he gets his own strip, where we’ll have a chance to explore whether Judge Dredd actually needs a supporting cast, and whether Walter is it. But in Luna-1 he’s both comic relief and bona fide sidekick. His fanatical devotion to Dredd is a joke, but he also manages to inveigle himself on actual missions, and is at Dredd’s side when he takes down “Mr Moony”, the tycoon who’s been trying to kill the Judge-Marshal since the storyline began.

The set-up of the Luna-City stories points to Dredd getting to play the anti-authority role against a corrupt establishment. But the presence of Walter guarantees that their tone will mainly be satirical, if not outright farcical. There are exceptions – Dredd’s showdown in “The Oxygen Desert” plays its Western tropes largely straight, including Dredd handing in his badge because he’s failed to bring a varmint in. But the glorious, McMahon-drawn Christmas story is much closer to the norm for this phase, from its opening with Walter’s “Please put a penny in Judge Dwedd’s hat” rhyme, to Dredd’s apparent sacrifice for his robot, to the final exchange of gifts. Satirical ideas wander in – five-a-side future sport as a replacement for war; the very Philip K Dick-esque fate of the creeps who pull off a heist in “The Oxygen Board” – but we are mostly reading a relaxed space Western story starring an action-comedy double act, one of whom happens to be the most popular character in the comic.

That summary doesn’t sound much like Judge Dredd, because it isn’t something the strip ever really returned to. At its best that tone made for good comics – there’s something really charming about the Dredd/Walter interactions in small doses, and it’s partly the fact the doses aren’t small that becomes a problem. The double-act model will become a standard part of most John Wagner strips that aren’t Dredd, but for this character it doesn’t quite work.

I want to be careful here, though. We know “action-comedy double act” doesn’t work as a status quo for Judge Dredd because we know what the Judge Dredd strip turns into, and by definition the stuff that lasts 47 years and counting “works”. But it isn’t there yet. The benefit of the Luna-City stories is that they give the writers a chance to define Dredd as a character. The problem is that defining him as a character still involves humanising him by giving him relationships. And even if the point of those relationships is to show how dedicated to his job he is, they can’t help but soften him: Walter may not get away with murder, but he regularly does all sorts of shit which a human would be in the cubes for. This is why what “Rico” did is so impressive and fundamental – it deepens and humanises Dredd by removing the possibility of relationships.

But the “Rico” Dredd is still not the dominant vision of the character. There’s a version of Judge Dredd these early stories are pointing to which the strip ultimately refused – one where Dredd is a much more sympathetic character, a hard bastard with a heart of gold who would prank his robo-servant but only pretend to forget its Christmas present. When exactly the heart-of-gold version of Dredd leaves the strip – or at least recedes fully into the background – is a major question for future posts. For now, I’d argue that’s the character the strip is building up, with 1978 about to give us an unambiguously heroic Dredd.

Before that, though, there’s one of the great Dredd one-shots, “Return To Mega City”, a story that ends the Luna-City story and feels like a tacit admission it didn’t quite work. It’s formatted like a classic Mort Weisinger era DC comic, where Superman is behaving radically out of character and the story is a puzzle about why. In this case, Dredd is back on the streets but doing nothing, strolling past crime and offering only the mildest of admonitions to lawbreakers. What is going on? A Rookie Judge rides up, urgently handing over Dredd’s re-admission papers to the force, and with them signed Dredd grabs the bike and rides down the perps, restored as the inevitable force he is, to the readers’ presumed joy and relief.

It’s a one-joke story which still manages to say everything needed about Dredd’s by-the-book attitude and which establishes that he and his city complete one another. You don’t have to humanise Dredd or find new angles on his character just yet; you can get years of mileage just bouncing the city off him. But the strip has wilder and weirder things to try before it makes that its default.

WHERE TO FIND IT? Dredd is being reprinted in toto in The Complete Case Files, and Vol 1 handily contains all the stories discussed here. It’s permanently in print and widely available.

RECOMMENDED? This stuff sits in a weird zone where it’s a highlight of early 2000AD but not necessarily a highlight of Dredd, and it’s seen as a poor introduction to him. Overall quality is high, though, and it’s well worth reading.

NEXT PROG: Move aside David Attenborough (or get eaten) – a sixteen week nature documentary from Mills, Wagner, Ramon Sola and more. It’s SHAKO.

WHICH THRILL? Aeroball is a jet-pack fuelled airborne contact sport and Harlem Heroes are the best team in the world. When most of the squad is killed in a ‘freak accident’, they must rebuild.

FORMULA ONE

Tom Tully knew sports comics backwards, and maybe that was the problem. Tully had been writing sports stories for over a decade, and the set-up of Harlem Heroes – a lashed-together group of lads who must learn to work together as a team to lift the title – was already a tried-and-trusted sports comic formula. But the fact it’s a formula isn’t quite the issue, as all the strips had formulaic elements – no episode of Flesh was going to pass without someone getting eaten by a dinosaur. The problem is the familiarity of those elements. By the third episode, reckless rookie Zack almost costs the Heroes a match, before getting chewed out by the captain then coming back on to save the game. If you’ve read many IPC sports stories before, you’ve read that one. To be honest, if you’ve read one IPC sports story before, you’ve read that one.

Every beat in Harlem Heroes is one the readers have seen before, and it makes it obvious that what you’re getting here is a conventional sports strip with SF trimmings. Some of the trimmings are ingenious, for sure. The standard-issue ‘opponents who play dirty’ are Soviet team the Siberian Wolves, and they get away with it simply because they have so many bodies in reserve they can do extremely dangerous things, so it’s also a way of showing off the many ways players of jetpack-driven future sport aeroball risk their lives. But nothing about the futuristic setting changes the actual plot of the story: this could be any team sport, in any era, at any level.

This is a problem for 2000AD. The comic’s promise to readers isn’t just solid stories, which Tom Tully is a master at delivering. It’s stories that show the reader things they’ve never seen before. If it’s obvious the SF elements in a strip like Harlem Heroes are decals on a very familiar vehicle, then it risks making all the SF elements in all the strips feel a little more cosmetic. Week on week, Harlem Heroes’ route one tactics are very effective – Tully is supremely efficient at resolving a cliffhanger and moving the story along to the next one. But it has little of the wildness and unpredictability that make the better strips sing. 

What it does have, thank goodness, is Dave Gibbons. We saw Gibbons briefly on Dan Dare – by drawing the opening Heroes episodes he’s the first British artist to get regular work on the comic, though he only got on board after seeing his friend Mike McMahon working on a Judge Dredd strip. His background was in fanzines and underground comics, with his first prominent work appearing in 1971’s The Trials Of Nasty Tales, a benefit dramatisation of the unsuccessful obscenity prosecution of the Nasty Tales underground title. He only draws two pages of it, but they’re confident, dramatic and highly recognisable as Gibbons.

Gibbons’ contemporaries were impressed by his speed as well as his quality, and it made him a good fit for the weekly grind of 2000AD. On Harlem Heroes he’s not yet great at differentiating characters, a problem in a strip where most of the cast wear the same costume and where the writer is only interested in the broadest-stroke characterisation, but luckily he can fit a name into most panels. And his style is immediately attractive – like early collaborator Brian Bolland he has a clear, dark line with strong use of shading, which works extremely well on a comic printed on low-grade “bog paper”.

He’s also a great choice for a strip where a good percentage of the action happens in mid-air. The first image in Harlem Heroes – a jetpack-enhanced shoulder charge – tells you almost everything you need to know about the invented sport of Aeroball, and it works because Gibbons’ figures have weight and momentum without having the kind of exaggerated motion you see in American comics. Gibbons, unlike some of his fellow 2000AD creators, actually liked superheroes, and designed the Heroes’ uniforms using Marvel and DC characters as an inspiration. Superhero fights sometimes require a kind of aerial ballet, and Gibbons draws on them, but tempered to the more down-to-earth action of a British sports strip. To the extent aeroball works on the page at all, it’s down to Gibbons’ solid judgment about how dramatic and unlikely an athlete’s airborne movement can be.

Gibbons’ other early strength is machinery and architecture. Tom Tully may sprinkle his production-line plots with futuristic settings and technological add-ons, but it’s Gibbons who gives the sporting world of 2050 weight. Everything from the transatlantic tunnel and the Heroes’ sleek tourbus, to the jetpacks and electrified barriers in the aeroball arena is given a level of vivid detail: when a player rams the ball into one of the holes in the cuboid scoring block, you can almost hear it clank and shudder. 

Thanks to Gibbons, readers could grasp the point of aeroball quickly, and Harlem Heroes mostly avoids the first pitfall of invented sports – the plot twist based around an entirely unrevealed rule (by the time Tully does trot this out, with a Japanese side who play using samurai swords, the strip is heading for its end anyway). But it still hits the second pitfall, which is that even if the sport makes sense, it’s extremely hard to care about.

IT’S A FUNNY OLD GAME

Since 2000AD keeps trying future sports stories, and since almost none of them are creative highlights or big reader hits, it’s worth digging into this a bit. What is it about future sports that makes it such a dud story category? (There are stories which successfully use sporting elements, like John Wagner’s great love of using commentators as a comic counterpoint to the action in several Judge Dredd episodes; I’m talking here about stories like Harlem Heroes or Mean Arena, where sport is the central organising idea of the strip)

The first thing to point out is that the sport part isn’t the problem. Sports are an absolute gift to episodic comic writers, as they come pre-packed with a narrative that has its own rhythms, peaks and lulls, all immediately recognisable to fans and readers. Sport was a vital category in British comics, one of the story types which worked across decades of publishing and was popular enough to sustain dedicated comics. These included IPC’s Roy Of The Rovers, on which Tully was lead writer for three decades, and which entered the language as shorthand for unlikely on-pitch feats. In Japan, meanwhile, sports comics achieved artistic peaks even Roy couldn’t match, artists using the longer episodes of manga to zero in on the intense psychology and moment-by-moment twists and reversals in sporting battles.

For all the cup-winning heroics associated with Roy Of The Rovers, one reason sports serials work is that they’re one of the few story types to allow some genuine uncertainty into the mix. Most comics heroes are not going to lose often, if at all, particularly if their adventures have life-or-death stakes. But loss is part of sport, an outcome as useful to the writer’s mix as victory. In the revived Eagle in 1982, after dragging their comprehensive school team from apathetic uselessness to the brink of cup triumph, the heroes of Thunderbolt And Smokey fail in the final: their happy ending (written by Tully) is to have persuaded their curmudgeonly teacher that sport is worth investing in.

In fact, one of the surprising things about a successful sports story is often how little sport there is in it. If, like me, you only knew Tom Tully from his contributions to 2000AD, a player with impressive workrate but little flair, it’s well worth reading his contribution to Action, Look Out For Lefty, one of the stories which landed that comic in trouble. A strip about a working-class talent with a dynamite left foot, Lefty keeps on-pitch action low compared to the knockabout Steptoe And Son style comedy of Lefty’s relationship with his feckless, alcoholic grandad, whose schemes and tribulations constantly hold the kid back. On the pitch are the usual triumphs and disasters of the sports story, but they’re framed with surreal and unpredictable antics – like a several episode plot in which Lefty is saddled with a cartful of knock-off garden gnomes – which make the story much funnier and more vivid than anything Tully produced for the Prog.

So sports stories work. But they work because their readers know the sport, probably watch and maybe play the sport, and because the rhythms of the sporting calendar (the match, the cup, the season) create a commonly understood framework for drama. The writer doesn’t need to explain the rules, the competitions, or the sporting goals of their characters, and that gives them more space to do other things – create real uncertainty around the outcomes, explore their characters’ psychology and emotions, and build up off-field drama and comedy to create stakes outside the matches.

With future sport, most of those dramatic advantages vanish. With no base of shared knowledge, the writer has to do more expository work to establish what the stakes are in a particular match, how badly the odds are stacked against the main characters, and, in a genre where cheating and unfair advantage is a motor for drama, how those things even happen. In Harlem Heroes, one result of this is that the Heroes sometimes look like absolute idiots, the most successful aeroball team in the world regularly blindsided by a complete lack of opposition research, or even awareness of regional rules, as these are things Tully prefers to explain as the match gets underway.

The other problem with future sport stories, and perhaps especially the ones in 2000AD, is that three ideas dominate creators’ conceptions of what the future of sport is going to be like. It will be faster, it will be more mechanised, and most importantly it will be more violent. The source for these ideas – and for Harlem Heroes, Action’s Death Game 1999, and ultimately every other dystopian sports strip – is 1975’s Rollerball, a modest box office success and one of the movies which persuaded Kelvin Gosnell that an SF comic was worth pitching to IPC in the first place.

The core elements of Rollerball – a completely corrupt sporting infrastructure overseeing an ultra-violent sport with a high casualty rate – are the backbone of Harlem Heroes too. The point of Rollerball, though, was not to create an exciting future sport – director/producer Norman Jewison was apparently horrified when investors asked to set up real life rollerball leagues. Instead it was born from Jewison’s (and writer William Harrison’s) disgust with the brutality of existing sports and the inhumane and anti-individual ethos of multinational corporations. Such high-minded motivations did not weather the trip across mediums well.

But whether for satirical reasons or not, Rollerball and its derivatives agree that future sport will be bloodthirsty. This isn’t an extrapolation from sporting trends so much as a bet on societal ones – entertainment of all sorts will become inexorably more violent. It’s the same bet John Sanders is making when he looks outside the generally staid IPC establishment and brings in Pat Mills to create more brutal, up-to-date comics. 2000AD is on the side of violence in a way more obviously satirical or dystopian treatments aren’t. This is eventually going to create not just moral but existential issues for the comic, but the ambiguity this introduces is also a reason that the actually satirical elements in 2000AD can work so well.

The problem is that if the story is framed so that the violence is the point of the strip, the thing which differentiates fictional sport from real sport, and the stakes for the characters become life and death, the weight of the violence is going to overwhelm all other story elements. Someone trying to murder team captain Giant on the pitch is more exciting than either Giant trying to score a goal or whatever’s going down at home. 

So in any future sport strip you’d expect the violent parts to get more attention than the sports parts, and the emphasis to change accordingly, becoming more and more of a Battle Royale set-up. All future sport stories end up, in fact, mirroring the distant past of spectator sports – the duels and chariot races of the Colosseum.

SQUEAKY BUM TIME

This is exactly what happens in Harlem Heroes, where the strip runs for 27 episodes, then goes on a two-month break before coming back as the even more violent and deadly Inferno. But you can also see it in the way the secondary plot of the series – the off-field stakes Tully creates – gradually takes over the main, sporting plot. This background story involves the Heroes trying to work out who caused the accident which wiped half the team out in episode one (and left one survivor a brain in a jar). 

This is not a tough case for the reader to crack. Aside from the team, and cyborg ex-player Artie Gruber who is trying to kill them on behalf of their mystery enemy, there is only one other recurring character in the strip: the Heroes’ wealthy backer, media mogul Ulysses Cord. But the revelation that Cord is a wrong ‘un is kept back for the finale, with the result that the focus of the story lands more and more on Gruber’s murderous plots and the ‘sport’ aspects become vestigial.

In terms of week-on-week thrill-power, the only real currency to judge 2000AD stories, this is entirely the right decision. Gruber is a compelling grotesque, a clanking psychotic boasting a magnificent Gibbons character design, and the first appearance of a regular 2000AD trope – the surgically-made monster with an ellipsis-laden, third-person speech pattern, like a psychopathic version of Marvel’s Hulk. He only has one role to play, but he’s immediately more interesting than anyone else the Heroes are up against.

No surprise then that the strip’s finest moment is when Gruber stops hanging around on the sidelines and simply joins the opposing team. The Heroes are drawn against opposition who are all body-modified cyborgs, built to thrill and horrify viewers in the interests of their corporate owners. Gruber murders their captain and takes his place, leading to a delirious storyline in which Gruber’s reckless play keeps killing off members of his own team, who ruefully forgive him as they think he’s their skipper. It’s the best story because the on-pitch and off-pitch violence, the sporting plot and the B-plot, are united, so Harlem Heroes feels purposeful and funny, rather than a slog from opponent to opponent.

These opponents are the other memorable Harlem Heroes element, with the cyborg uglies offering a break from a succession of outfits whose set-up is “national stereotype, turned to 11”. A team of Samurai! A team of Scotsmen! Two German teams, one medieval knights and one outright neo-Nazis! There’s a line between “corny” and “offensive” with this kind of story, and it’s one 2000AD doesn’t always stay on the better side of, especially where Asian countries are concerned. Tom Tully doesn’t, by my lights, do anything too egregious in Harlem Heroes, but even the good side of that dividing line involves a lot of hackneyed tropes. 

The general line a Harlem Heroes story takes is that the opposing teams rely on violence and brute force to get their wins and intimidate rivals: the Heroes beat them by keeping their heads and outwitting them with skill and style. While they’re absolutely prepared to get physical, the Harlem Heroes don’t rely on violence in the way every other 2000AD protagonist does: when they’re tempted to, the strip explicitly positions itself against that. This flair-based approach is a nod to the Harlem Heroes’ chief inspiration, exhibition basketball stars the Harlem Globetrotters, whose fame in the UK was peaking thanks to their TV cartoon exploits. The Globetrotters source makes Giant and the Heroes unusual 2000AD characters in another way: they’re 2000AD’s first Black leads.

Concern over Black representation in comics long predates the tiresome modern complaints that comics have become too ‘woke’: in his Kings Reach memoir, John Sanders talks about a 1970s letter criticising IPC for its lack of Black characters. While his anecdote is dismissive, it’s dismissive because, in Sanders’ eyes, the complaint was groundless. IPC had plenty of Black characters. The accuracy of this is open to question, but the point is that even at the time the concept that representation mattered was familiar.

Of course, what also mattered was the roles Black characters played. In comics defined by action and violence, Black characters are often as violent as all the rest, but they aren’t uniquely or stereotypically so. And while the fact the only Black lead characters in early 2000AD and Action are athletes mirrors media stereotypes, it also reflects the fact that almost everything in the comics is a ‘dead crib’ from something or someone, so the comics’ Black heroes were always going to draw on wider portrayals of Black men. (Though the IPC “dead crib” strategy of lifting from hot action films never got as far as Blaxploitation) Action had a Black lead, the John Wagner-written boxing saga Black Jack – summary: what if Muhammad Ali was going blind? – and it frankly depicted the racism its lead character faced, though only after he decided to head to America. 

So in the context of late 70s British comics, Harlem Heroes’ status as the one Black-led 2000AD cast and the one strip where violence is not in fact the default answer feels a genuine positive. And in a series completely reliant on national stereotypes for its storylines, Tully is wise enough to stay away from that with the Heroes themselves. There’s not a lot in the strip which specifically addresses the Blackness, or for that matter the Harlem-ness, of its leads – but looking at how everyone else in the story is written, that might not be a bad thing.

The skill of the Heroes aeroball team, and the way they use that skill to win, moves to center stage as the villainous Ulysses Cord makes his move and the strip comes to its end. It turns out that Cord – shocking few readers – is the one sabotaging the Harlem Heroes as well as managing them, and his motives are interesting ones. As part of the consortium who runs the sport, he’s upset at the Heroes’ degree of skill, and the bloodless way in which they win their games. It’s making the sport predictable and less aggressive, and audiences are staying away. So the Heroes had to go.

The Harlem Heroes expose Ulysses Cord, win the aeroball championship, and earn their happy ending, though at a cost – half the team is unceremoniously offed in the final episode, with veteran Conrad King and poor Hairy (a straight lift from the Harlem Globetrotters’ bald superstar Fred “Curly” Neal) killed in a single panel. The characters may want to eschew violence, but it claims them in the end. And lingering questions remain. As I said above, 2000AD itself is on the side of violence – it’s at the heart of its promise to readers of a more visceral type of comic. 2000AD’s own ethos is a lot closer to Ulysses Cord than it is to the Harlem Heroes themselves: satisfy the audience’s desire for action, combat and, yes, blood. And if characters can’t reliably provide those? Perhaps there’s no place for them in the comic. When the Harlem Heroes return, it’s in a world where Cord was proved right: aeroball is dead, more violent options rule. And the brutal one-upmanship of comic violence will threaten not just the Heroes characters, but the comic itself.

WHERE TO FIND IT: A Complete Harlem Heroes edition – featuring this strip and sequel Inferno, is avaiable on the 2000AD webshop.

RECOMMENDED?: Dave Gibbons’ art is terrific but the repetitive stories make this one hard to fully recommend. Things pick up with the involvement of Gruber from episode 9.

NEXT PROG:

WHICH THRILL? The power of computerised acupuncture and a computer in his brain turns British secret agent John Probe into the super-spy MACH 1

NEEDLES AND THE DAMAGE DONE

“Science fiction doesn’t sell” was – according to 2000AD’s second editor Kelvin Gosnell – received wisdom at IPC when 2000AD was conceived. That was one reason Dan Dare showed up as a bet-hedging exercise. And the particular bet management were keen to hedge – the one that got 2000AD approved in the first place – also drove the choice of 2000AD’s last two launch stories. 

The comic was based on a gamble that a wave of popular sci-fi films and TV would give a futuristic paper a decent shot at survival, at least for a couple of years. Gosnell, a keen young IPC staffer and SF fan, wrote a memo in late 1975 outlining this wave – the then-forthcoming Close Encounters and Star Wars movies, existing SF films like Rollerball, and the model for MACH 1: TV hit The Six Million Dollar Man, which existed in an intersection between sci-fi and secret agent capers. 2000AD’s target audience of kids knew Steve Austin and liked Steve Austin. When IPC greenlit a sci-fi mag, a British Steve Austin was an obvious move.

This makes MACH 1 the most traditional strip in the launch Prog. Traditional not just in the sense that any kid reading it would know instantly what they were getting, but because strips thinly based on other media properties – “dead cribs” in office parlance – were a British comics mainstay. One Eyed Jack, John Wagner’s Valiant strip about a New York cop, is a filed-off Dirty Harry. The Leopard From Lime Street, token adventure strip in humour comic Buster, was England’s Spider-Man. And any reader of Action could have named the spawning ground of notorious killer shark Hook Jaw.

Dead cribs weren’t an attempt to be sly. The familiarity was the point, like the just-different-enough branding on the Aldi versions of Penguin biscuits. A dead crib from a top action film gave kids something they wanted, but couldn’t get – probably the majority of Action’s readers were too young to see Jaws, and even if they did get in, 90 minutes of shark action might only leave them wanting more. Hook Jaw filled a need, and let creators be inventive in coming up with ways to extend and twist the source material – in Hook Jaw’s case, making the shark win. But MACH 1 is on shakier ground here – kids could see the Six Million Dollar Man any week it was on. What kind of alternative could 2000AD provide?

In the beginning they hardly needed one. This kind of “we have X at home” strip development had a lot of advantages. For a start it took the readers far less time to get on board. MACH 1’s gesture at differentiation is ludicrous – “computerised acupuncture”, you say? – but it doesn’t matter a bit. John Probe, the Man Activated by Compu-puncture Hyperpower, gets no background, no past and no real introduction, because the readers are fully aware of who he is and want to get to the violence. He’s a jaw, a hairline and a pair of hyper-powered fists. And predictably MACH 1, not Dan Dare, became the first reader favourite – the kids were much more familiar with the Bionic Man than with the hero of Spacefleet.

A borrowed concept also makes things simpler for the writers, and when you look at the credits for the early MACH 1 strips it’s a merry-go-round of creators. Pat Mills, as usual, sets the tone, but unlike his handover of Invasion! to a single writer, MACH 1 gets passed around, mostly to a set of writers with little or no wider 2000AD association – Peter Harris, Roy Preston, Robert Flynn, and others. This makes it very hard for MACH 1 to build or sustain any kind of identity, as there’s no obvious brief other than to do a British Six Million Dollar Man story, and no real sense of what that even is beyond “a bit grittier”. It’s not that the writers don’t go at their job with gusto – and the editorial hand of Mills is very evident, injecting quite ordinary spy stories with a shot of gonzo melodrama – but there’s no way of disguising how repetitive the series quickly becomes.

Like Flesh, it’s useful to contrast MACH 1 with its most obvious model from Action, the hard-as-nails spy series Dredger. Dredger has no superhuman powers beyond toughness and his trusty Magnum, and like Bill Savage in Invasion! he gets to show off how hard he is by contrast with a posher but feebler alternative, Etonian agent Simon Breed. But structurally Dredger and MACH 1 stories are very similar – one-episode stories of a spy mission with lashings of violence. But while it’s just as formulaic, Dredger is a much more impressive comic. The lack of space for storytelling, and the lack of Hyper-Power as a get-out-of-jail card, forces writers for Dredger to be much more inventive, often beginning each story with Dredger and Breed in an impossible situation and needing to be ingenious in its resolution. MACH 1 tries the same trick on occasion but there’s a lot more linear plotting too – Probe gets briefed; Probe flies in; Probe beats the threat up. And Dredger has a second mode it works in – street-level danger – which MACH 1 can’t match and takes time to find its equivalent of.

BRITS ABROAD

If MACH 1 stands out for anything, it’s as the most nationalist thing in early 2000AD – no mean feat in a comic with Invasion! But it’s inevitable from the premise. For a done-in-one secret agent series to work you need a Britain that’s at constant, deadly, weekly risk. MACH 1 is the last line of defence in a world whose threat level is permanently maxed out. Some of the enemies and rivals are real countries – China and Japan – others are invented. After John Sanders nixed the Russian involvement in Invasion!, it’s not surprising to find them with an identity crisis here. They flicker between themselves and anonymised “Eastern forces” (who still say “Niet! Niet!” when MACH 1 comes to call). The Middle East is represented by “Irania” and “Turkostan”. This latter boasts a holy place called the “Black Mosque” in a capital city called, and here the illusion is badly strained, Macca.

John Probe’s approach on his grand tour of exotic locations is very consistent. In his gung-ho defence of British interests he’s the least secret of agents; most of his plans begin and end with smashing stuff up. Allies surface occasionally, particularly the Americans, who are (of course) overconfident and unreliable. With contemporary European threats off the table, his time is often taken up by assorted terrorists, who tend to have German names and accents. It’s a real shock when in one story we meet the “British Mining Corporation” who are obvious crooks, haw-hawing over their exploitation of “the natives” on a Pacific Island, in a story which is otherwise an outing for the “Japanese holdout” trope.

That mission leaves a “bad taste” in John Probe’s mouth, but this tacit admission that maybe British interests aren’t always virtuous is as bold as early MACH 1 gets. Even as the one contemporary 2000AD strip, it stays scrupulously away from anything that might feel like current British politics or foreign policy. Even Marvel’s Captain Britain, as unrecognisable a UK-set story as ever saw print, managed to get a Silver Jubilee story in, albeit one in which the Queen is mind-controlled to declare war on an African former colony. Colonialist fallout in Africa is another hot topic MACH 1 entirely avoids, though it’s hard to see this as a loss. Kelvin Gosnell alleged in one interview that IPC suggested a story about an African leader who was half-gorilla, which mercifully never got anywhere near print.

Still, if you do want casual racism in early 2000AD, MACH 1 is the strip you’re after – a weird Bermuda Triangle story features a mad scientist with “slant-eyed” troops, who John Probe guns down once their master is defeated. From a craft perspective, MACH 1 stories tend to use their five pages effectively, cramming in as many short action sequences and familiar visual elements as possible. And in a globe-trotting context, “familiar visual elements” means “a parade of cliches”. This can make for grim reading. One episode is an orientalist bingo card of superstitious desert tribes, corrupt sheikhs, and topless women in harem pants facing the lash. Its name in the 2000AD database is simply “Arab Story”.

As Probe thwarts plot after plot, and his cranial computer meticulously counts off all the bits of real-world military hardware the stories use, I start to get a nagging feeling that all this isn’t, well, isn’t very 2000AD. One thing about 2000AD, as its identity gradually emerges over the course of its first three years, is how that identity is defined as much by the stories that don’t fit as the ones that do. Not fitting isn’t always a reflection on quality – there are some stories which are so good at being “not 2000AD” that they change what the comic can be. On one hand it’s silly to talk about a strip in the very first Prog as not fitting 2000AD – MACH 1 is part of what defines 2000AD – but there’s a sense that whatever the nascent 2000AD vibe is, MACH 1 has it only at a surface level. The skull-cracking violence probably couldn’t surface elsewhere, but the framework would be just fine in Valiant, Lion, Battle or any of the other IPC boys’ papers. And the elements of the rough-edged 2000AD style that are there make the jingoistic tone feel sleazier and nastier.

Yes, there are hints of more interesting ideas here and there. A Mills hero thrives on not doing what he’s told, and John Probe has some of that. Early on his main foil is his onboard computer itself, a rare borrowing from US comics via a borrowed issue of Deathlok. It’s forever telling him not to save irrelevant bystanders or express emotion. This isn’t played for laughs or even as a plot element: Probe is at complete liberty to ignore its whingeing, and does so. Instead the computer is there to make Probe seem more heroic to the reader, offering a constant but powerless authority figure to give the hyper-powered finger to. It’s a useful, overused trick.

In the background, though, there’s a more convincing antagonist. Probe’s boss, Sir Denis Sharpe, does not have any of MACH 1’s best interests at heart, and the stage is set for Mills’ themes of class and resistance to authority to push through again. This bubbling conflict and resentment between management and field agents is a part of the spy genre which MACH 1’s million-dollar source material rarely if ever explored, but it’s especially important to the British spy novel. And it’s an obvious way for MACH 1 to strike out into its own territory and develop as a story. 

But for a long time – the first six months of the strip – it doesn’t go there. The many-handed, highly episodic nature of MACH 1 means these themes are far more muffled than they were in Invasion! or Flesh. Most of the time, John Probe is a generic figure, an honourable bruiser beating up a host of mostly foreign devils in stories where you’re as likely to find hackneyed stereotypes as thrill-power.

MACH DADDY

And yet, as I said, the readers loved it. This is the problematic thing about declaring that MACH 1 is somehow less 2000AD-ish than the other strips. For the first few months, before being overtaken by Judge Dredd during his “Robot Wars” story, this series was what readers most wanted 2000AD to be. Why?

The obvious similarity to a hit TV show is part of it, but MACH 1 was also a clear example of the “Sweeney strip” concept I talked about in the Invasion! entry – a story that revolved around its main character’s street-level toughness and no-nonsense approach to problems. John Probe’s superhuman, literal hardness, and the done-in-one stories in which he despatches a bunch of scumbags while ignoring his nagging computer, make him an ideal lead for this sort of story, and he only falls from his perch in readers’ eyes when an even more effective Sweeney strip kicks into gear.

Back in the Invasion! post I talked briefly about how SF and the Sweeney strip are a difficult fit. In order to fit in SF elements, you almost always sacrifice some of the gritty, authentic-feeling elements that draw an audience to the strip. MACH 1 is one attempt to solve the problem – John Probe gets sent on ever more outlandish and high-octane missions, until he’s doing things like running up Everest and using the corpses of frozen mountaineers as clubs while fighting a Tibetan Army heat weapon. You might say MACH 1’s main interest now is as an index of the kind of things that turned up in late 70s comic strips, a merry-go-round of neo-pulp tropes: the Bermuda Triangle, Yetis, lost Nazi treasure, UFOs, Kung Fu.

But whatever weirdness lurks in the background, Probe always comes over like an ordinary bloke doing a tough job. He boasts at one point of his “license to kill” and his vibe is indeed more James Bond than Steve Austin. But it’s Bond as a down-to-earth, hard-bitten fighter who also happens to have superhuman strength and endurance. It’s futuristic, but it’s not a weird or conceptual or mind-expanding or world-building futuristic, it’s just a guy who can punch really hard. Because of computerised acupuncture.

And it’s a direction 2000AD could have gone in – episodic adventure paper stories mixing a Sweeney-esque toughness with fantastical plots. The strips which do that initially – Invasion!, MACH 1 and then Judge Dredd – are more popular than the ones that don’t, and it’s only Dredd’s huge success when it starts varying the formula and building out its setting that starts to shift that story’s direction and leave MACH 1 feeling more of an odd strip out, a prototype of the 2000AD template not an implementation of it.

Still, MACH 1 was popular enough to be pitched as a solo title, apparently as a pilot for a line designed to introduce US style monthly titles to the UK market. This proposal, again by Kelvin Gosnell, didn’t go anywhere – IPC were unconvinced such comics would work in Britain (the market has mostly agreed). It’s tricky to imagine what such a comic could have been like – in his early months John Probe feels like the 2000AD character least suited to any kind of extended story. The spectacular but forgettable 5-pager was his natural habitat.

RETURN OF THE MACH

Or was it? By the end of 1977, MACH 1 was starring in longer stories, ones which actually built up his world and moved wider plots forward. Pat Mills came back to the strip for a pair of thrills that began this work, ditching some of the dubious wider geopolitics and mixing widescreen action with secrets and cover-ups, finally finding a second mode the strip can work in. “Planet Killers” takes the trad MACH 1 formula and shows how good and wild “superpowered James Bond” could have been, a Thunderball-on-speed three-parter with intense, swirling Jesus Redondo art which has MACH 1 being roasted in a space shuttle’s exhaust burn and crashing it into a rogue ICBM. “UFO” goes further out, mashing Bond with Bodysnatchers in a story which rapidly shifts from small-scale horror to a full-on invasion, with MACH 1 left raging at the end by the US government’s callous cover-up of mass death.

These two are easily the best MACH 1 stories so far, and proof that the character could work at length, giving the over-the-top super-spy plots a bit of room to breathe so they don’t feel so perfunctory. But they’re also a solid example of how badly early 2000AD needed Mills, who was a master of writing stories which satisfied every week and still constantly escalated their stakes. When other people wrote longer MACH 1 stories, they immediately began to feel padded. “MACH Woman”, for instance, where the Russians get the secrets of Compu-Puncture Hyper-Power and create a hot young super-agent to murder MACH 1, is an idea the strip had to do sometime. But every beat in Alan Hebden’s story is rote; a Bond girl riff that, in a comic for tweenage boys, has to be sparklessly chaste. 2000AD could paint the comic red when it came to violence, but sex was absolutely off-limits, and Probe’s womanising was limited to the odd off-duty speedboat ride. In any case, death is a standard outcome for Probe’s one-off support cast; Tanya may instantly defect, and later die in Probe’s arms, but it has no more weight than any other grumpy conclusion.

Through all these later stories, though, we’ve been getting reminders that Probe’s superior, Denis Sharpe, is not to be trusted, and as 1977 ends this idea brings MACH 1’s adventures to a temporary climax. There’s a clever idea here, as we’ve been teased with the notion that MACH 1 will inevitably be replaced by a superior MACH 2 model. But what we actually find out is that there’s a MACH 0, warped by the treatment and caged up in a government facility with only The Muppet Show for company. Discovering and helping Zero is the cue for Probe to finally break with Sharpe, and there, for now, we leave him. “MACH Zero” is a good story, partly because they commissioned Flesh’s beast master Ramon Sola to draw it, so the action scenes have an anatomy-defying ferocity that’s unusual for the strip. But even though Sharpe’s heel turn has been teased from the outset, it still feels a little sudden, partly because Sharpe has never become an actual character, just a central-casting bad boss.

Like the Mills stories, this is another answer to the question of “what do we do with this strip?”. And it works to an extent – MACH 1 has a direction now. But Mills’ stories grew out of the existing strip – they were a bigger, better version of ordinary MACH 1 adventures. In a different comic, John Probe could have enjoyed a happy run punching UFOs and wrestling outside space shuttles with the occasional bit of fist-shaking to underline that he was doing it on sufferance. Hebden’s stories deliberately cut that possibility off, moving MACH 1 to its built-in destination of John Probe fighting his government, not working with it. As we’ll see again and again in 2000AD, once you pull this lever and torch a strip’s status quo, you have two options: find something that works to replace it, or let it end. The choice MACH 1 makes will help define the comic in ways his actual adventures never did.

WHERE TO READ IT: Mach 1’s adventures are collected in two volumes, available at the 2000AD Webshop – this post includes stories up to the midway point of the second one.

RECOMMENDED? Not really, though there’s a step up when you get to the longer stories. “Planet Killers”, “UFO” and “MACH Zero” are the strip at its best, expanding on the more formulaic, episodic early stories.

NEXT PROG: The last of the original five 2000AD strips, and a chance to ask – SPORT! Huh! What is it good for? It’s HARLEM HEROES!

M.A.C.H.1 and 2000AD (c) Rebellion

Despite being six years into this project, I have yet to review

It could have been an inauspicious start to a solo career, but there has been no attempt to rewrite history: the original name stands on the redesigned cover artwork as per the vinyl re-release of his back catalogue; the image itself is reminiscent of the “Seven Nation Army” video I have never been able to watch in its entirety because it gives me motion sickness. Neither the original nor the updated cover give many clues about the film’s subject or genre, and the info I’ve found has been pretty limited to the soundtrack itself. 

But based on the music, which for the most part is instrumental soundscape / interstitial textures that could easily double as part of a film score, psychological horror might be a good punt. Because while there is quite a bit of classic, thick-cut ORL shred seeded throughout, a good deal of the music is actively unpleasant. Contemporaneous reviews appear to have been broadly positive, though coming from Volta stans that’s unsurprising; Sputnik Music was excited about similarities between “Around Knuckle White Tile” and “Vermicide” from the Mars Volta’s Amputechture. But fans were also honest about the difficult noise, while appreciating the creative control and resultant bag emptied of fucks. Allmusic aptly summarised the overall vibe as occasionally aggravating but more often intriguing.

I’m inclined to agree, but it is telling that it’s taken me this long to get around to reviewing it. While I’m still searching for my ideal working instrumental music, there’s way too much itchiness embedded throughout for this to qualify. Which is a shame, because the good parts totally whip. The jams are restrained and avoid extended improv indulgences, but I get the feeling any of them could have gone that way at a live show, spiralling into a 40-minute event that I’m retrospectively jealous of. Plus, as ORL solo records will often have an easter egg aspect for excited Mars Volta fans to identify motifs and earlier versions, (as aforementioned nod to “Vermicide”) there is a lot of nerdly detective joy in listening.

The first three tracks feature lots of gauzy white noise, squally angry machine protests and traditional noodly shred, where the layers are more individuated. But maybe because of the lack of fuzzy edges, too often the repetition swells like a throbbing limb; there’s neither comfort nor progression. This means that although the inevitable tradjam is always welcome, the irritating crunchy bits have been looping too long, and it’s made worse by the volume dipping so low you’d strain to hear without headphones, only to then crash into a noise jump-scare. They are all much of a piece, one which on the whole is mostly pleasant but not memorable. 

But they are the best of the instrumentals and suffer the least from being divorced from the visual narrative. “Dramatic Theme” is seven minutes of buzzing grind, nowhere near smooth enough to be background music, before swinging back towards something less experimental, although even this is more akin to an assault. The continual typewriter sound effects in “A Dressing Failure” make it unlistenable, and “Sensory Decay Part II” is the juddering and clicky pecking of some creepy lizard-creature from a hokey ‘50s sci-fi B-movie, except you’re an actual child who’s genuinely frightened. Props to the Jeopardy! approved ‘Before & After’ category title “Of Blood Blue Blisters”, the track with Jeremy Ward’s ‘yelling’ credits and the one even the most devoted apparatchiks struggled with. Although it does eventually start rocking and Ikey Owens’s piano is always welcome, it’s not enough. “Dream Sequence” might be the least objectionable but is ultimately boring.

The best is saved for last via “The Palpitations Form a Limit” because two words: HOORAY CEDRIC; unsurprisingly, this song could have been a Mars Volta b-side and for many is the album’s raison d’être. Confusingly sexy and sexily confusing vocals are supported with sensuous, De Facto-esque drums slapping over a thick, smooth foundation. Cedric’s falsetto duets with classic ORL shred, which will always be my favourite kind of Mars Volta this, showcasing the funky lyrical logic that is my second favourite kind (‘can’t you never stay any longer / as long as you still run’). 

A Manual Dexterity has some undeniably rocking moments and unique textural interplay, but the lack of wider context from the film means that some of the sound effects are just baffling noise choices. Divorced from the visual guidance of the film, they remind me of the parts I hate most in Cryptomnesia and Xenophanes. But at least on those two, there’s both enough complexity to be able to focus on something else, and also those interludes are generally shorter.   

Which is a shame, because I really do enjoy a good deal of the instrumental pieces, and “Deus Ex Machina” and “The Palpitations Form a Limit” are brilliant. But this album is like a house whose beautiful interior decorations are occasionally paired with a stark aesthetic choice, like a plain, concrete floor, which would be fine except also there’s a weird, pervasive chicken-and-stars soup odour you just can’t parse out or ignore. 

Track listing:
Around Knuckle White Tile
Dyna Sark Arches
Here the Tame Go By
Deus Ex Machina
Dramatic Theme
A Dressing Failure
Sensory Decay Part II
Of Blood Blue Blisters
Dream Sequence
The Palpitations Form a Limit

WHICH THRILL? 23rd Century cowboys head back to the Cretaceous to solve world hunger by farming dinosaurs. A lot of people get eaten.

JURASSIC AARGH!

There’s an important question behind this blog which I’ve so far been side-stepping a bit: are these comics actually any good? I’ve had good things to say about Dan Dare and Invasion! but the truth is I’m grading on a curve here: early 2000AD is hellaciously exciting in comparison to any other British boys’ comic of the time, but come to the class of ‘77 expecting the sophistication of even the mid-80s stories and you might be disappointed. Still, do one dimension well enough and you don’t need any others. When early 2000AD cooks, it really cooks, with a gonzo delight in its own outrageousness backed up with genuine care and craft. 

This is still a comic built for 8-10 year old boys to read one issue of each week, though, and it was very effective at doing that job, which means there’s plenty of repetition, and resolutions take the shape of violent punchlines. Go in expecting that and you’ll have a great time. The fact that 2000AD can – and did – appeal beyond small boys is what made it special, but the small boy appeal came first.  

In terms of quality, early 2000AD has several big things going for it, most of which are Pat Mills’ doing. We’ve talked about the opportunities created by longer story page counts, and the basic concept of street-level, anti-authoritarian protagonists in sci-fi settings. I should also mention the decision to go with hand-lettering rather than the typeset letters typically used on Action, Battle and the IPC Girls’ comics: it makes a huge difference to how organic and well-integrated the lettering and the art feels, and hand-lettering gradually became the norm after 2000AD’s success. And finally the layouts on the first few issues of 2000AD are extremely dynamic – there’s a reason most of the art extracts here have stray bits and pieces of panels appended, because the pages are composed as a whole to look as explosive as possible. That one wasn’t Mills’ doing – Art Editor Doug Church did the layouts for every strip in the early Progs, with a flair for action which helped teach the artists the kind of pages the new comic needed.

But there’s a difference between Mills making those breakthroughs and them delivering brilliant (or sometimes even good) comics on a weekly basis; and besides, those are ingredients in what will become classic 2000AD, but they aren’t the full dish. Prog 1 of 2000AD genuinely is a great comic, because it’s a masterclass in how to introduce characters and ideas. And it’s a manifesto for great comics because of that. But it’s not a manifesto which actually produces greatness on a regular basis for a while.

I’m talking about this now because there’s an exception to this, the launch strip which most closely approaches greatness: Flesh. This story about time-travelling 23rd century ranchers harvesting dinosaurs for food to satisfy future lust for meat is the shortest-running in the initial line-up – a compact 19 weeks of guys being eaten, clawed, poisoned by giant spiders, impaled on pterosaur beaks, et cetera. Even then it has the usual merry-go-round of writers and artists (the reprints credit some episodes to “R.E.Wright”) which generally means big swings in quality. That’s kind of true in Flesh too, with basic questions like “how large is a Tyrannosaur?” getting wildly different answers. But in Flesh the week-on-week chaos doesn’t matter nearly as much, because, unlike its Prog 1 stablemates, the story is built around ideas, and themes, and a wider story of a society at a crisis point.

This is one of the great opportunities an SF comic allows if, like Mills, you have a penchant for anti-authoritarian heroes. Implicit in the idea of the anti-authoritarian is the idea that there are authorities, and these authorities are wrong, corrupt, undeserving of their power. As mentioned in the Invasion! entry, there are very few 2000AD stories which start from the idea that things have improved. But in a story set in the present or the historical past, that’s as far as the concept can really go: your hero can go against the grain of the system, spit on its rules, and win victories over individual faces of it, but they can’t bring the whole thing down. Fantasy and SF, though, allow you to tell stories about collapsing systems and overthrown authorities – if you’re prepared to let those stories end. Mills’ two most successful series for 2000AD, Nemesis and Sláine, both star system-destroying protagonists.

The system in Flesh is corrupt and unsustainable. What’s great about it is that the story of the comic is not just the story of time-traveling cowboys fighting dinosaurs – though that’s an absolute banger idea even with no wider themes. Flesh is instead the story of that systemic unsustainability, as the smarter elements among the Trans-Time Rangers realise that over-farming prehistoric herbivores has created a food chain crisis of berserk, starved meat-eaters, and the short-sighted bureaucrats and profiteers who run it don’t see the catastrophic implications of this until they end up in the jaws of death themselves (still yelling about profit – this is not a subtle comic). Over five months of comics, the crisis plays out, and not to the humans’ advantage.

STRONG FEMALE LEAD

The fact that Flesh is the story of a system as much as the story of the people in it guides its choice of protagonist. There’s an interesting aside in Pat Mills’ book about how the most successful 2000AD strips tend to be named after the hero – when he later brought back Invasion!, the editor suggested the name change to Savage. But Flesh consciously breaks this rule. It’s a story named after the lead characters’ motivation, the resource all of them are willing to kill for. 

In the first episode it looks like the hero of Flesh might be easy to identify. It’s Joe Bronkowski, rookie dinosaur herder who learns the hard way how dangerous the prehistoric world is. Or maybe it’s Earl Reagan, his more battle-hardened boss, who fits the rugged, working-guy template of the 2000AD hero. A couple of episodes in we meet Claw Carver, who’s every obviously an antagonist – he’s constantly on the take, only interested in personal gain and betrays other characters without thinking. But physically he’s the kind of man who would make a great action hero, having lost his hand to a velociraptor, killed the beast, and replaced his missing limb with the dinosaur’s own claw.

But by then we’ve been introduced to our actual lead character – the 120-year-old she-Tyrannosaur Old One Eye, Reagan’s nemesis and the de facto leader of the dinosaur army. Initially she’s just a particularly ancient and gruesome dinosaur – the story makes much of her warts and breath, and she’s constantly referred to as “hag”, summoning up imagery of witchcraft and the supernatural (a link made entirely literal when a clone turns up in a later Mills-written story: he’s called Satanus and has magic blood).

Old One Eye dominates the page like she dominates her pack – as with Belardnelli’s centre-spreads on Dan Dare, she’s an example of the extended story page count paying off, with several instances where a full length portrait of One Eye in her savage grandeur fills a whole page and the rest of the action has to happen around it. The strip’s artists get into the brief of an ancient, battle-scarred tyrannosaur with some of Old One Eye’s own gusto – she is a truly monstrous figure, a hulking form covered in lumps and scars and knobbles, giving the impression that every inch of her hide has at some point been ripped apart then scarred over.

The artists on Flesh are all drawn from 2000AD’s Spanish contingent – Joan Boix begins the strip, but most episodes come from Ramon Sola, who had creature-feature experience as the regular artist on Action’s rampaging-shark strip Hook Jaw. As 2000AD evolved and picked up the generation of British artists most associated with it, the Spanish contingent began to fall away, getting more regular work from IPC’s other comics. But they were popular with the early editors and for good reason – Kelvin Gosnell has talked about how their training in figure work was more extensive, which meant they delivered comics at a high basic standard of storytelling, a life-saver in the tight, small-panel world of traditional British comics.

Sola offered something a little different, though, which made him especially strong on a strip like Flesh. Where he excelled was in moments of chaotic, visceral violence – the point in the story where the human order breaks down under the sheer will to destroy of jaw, paw or claw. The Goya of the animal-rampage genre, Sola’s figures are often wild, extended and cartoonish, and his animals are a blur of slashing lines and shadow. Mills, whose vision of Flesh and other beast-based stories was rooted in this conflict between man and nature, called Sola a genius, and for this type of strip, he was.

Mills described his creation Hook Jaw as an “ecological” story, and he had a point, inasmuch as Hook Jaw spends an awful lot of his time beating up oil rigs. But the tag is better applied to Flesh, a story about an ecosystem, humans’ meddling with it, and the disastrous consequences of it, not least for the humans. The most famous fictional model of “humans go back to the Cretaceous and fuck things up” is Ray Bradbury’s 1952 story ‘A Sound Of Thunder’, which Flesh is in brutal conversation with. In Bradbury’s story, a minor incident in deep time alters the present in dreadful but incomprehensible ways. In Flesh, nobody involved gives a shit about changing the future, only extending the rapacious machines of human consumption back into the past to loot it. In fact, the story occasionally implies that the predations of the Trans-Time Corporation are what actually results in the extinction of the dinosaurs – despite the retributive carnage at the end, humanity has extracted too many pounds (well, tonnes) of flesh from the dinosaurs and the doom of both species may now be sealed. The sheer, profit-driven short-sightedness of the Corporation is one of the parts of Flesh that has aged horribly well – one of the story’s most famous images is of a human and tyrannosaur hybrid, fused together somehow by the time jump back to the 23rd century, an unforgettable visual indicator of how gut-level wrong Trans-Time’s meddling is.

And then, just to bulk the thematic load up even more, Mills makes the humans cowboys. 

WHERE THE STYRACOSAUR ROAM

Pat Mills’ techniques and idiosyncrasies as a writer are something this blog will come back to again and again, particularly once he steps back as an editorial presence and becomes one of the comic’s backbone of writers. One very obvious thing you notice about his work, though, is that even by the standards of 2000AD and boys’ comics, it’s ferociously direct. When Pat Mills uses a story to make a point, it stays made. Mills, at least on 2000AD, is not usually a subtle storyteller. But directness doesn’t preclude thought or complexity. Mills has topics he’ll return to repeatedly in 2000AD, turning them over from different angles, finding echoes and mirrors across at least a decade of work.

One of the big things Mills is interested in is colonialism. A recurring set-up in his 2000AD stories is an occupying power pitted against indigenous peoples. It shows up in the ABC Warriors, in Nemesis (repeatedly), and in Sláine, before the mask of metaphor drops for his late-80s Crisis opus Third World War, about near-future teenagers fighting corporate proxy wars in Central America. But the anti-colonial axis in his work is always at an angle with the anti-authoritarian axis, and he’s most interested in where the two rub against each other. Mills’ iterations of his anti-colonial set-up tend to be full of morally gray, corrupt or simply ineffective leaders on the ‘good’ side, and are also regularly concerned with the experiences of the footsoldiers on the ‘bad’ side. (Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles is in many ways the most Millsian comic not actually by Pat Mills, though unforgivably lacking in people being eaten by dinosaurs)

This explains a lot of what’s going on in Flesh. The Trans-Time Rangers are cowboys because cowboys fighting dinosaurs is an amazing visual hook for a kids’ comic, and because writers can have a lot of fun with tropes like the drunken frontier town Doctor (“Joe’s recoverin’… He’s the first patient who ain’t died on me!”). But they’re also cowboys because what Mills is evoking with this set-up isn’t just the Western genre – of which more when we get to Dredd – but the actual history of the American West, specifically the slaughter of the American bison in the 19th Century. Vast wild herds of animals hunted to near-extinction by colonisers, with catastrophic effects on the traditional hunters and herders of these beasts. The result is war. But we’re seeing the war from the “footsoldier” perspective of Reagan, Carver and Bronkowski, three guys of distinct skills, experience and morality caught up in the disaster.

(If you think the buffalo analogy is accidental, check out the 1978 2000AD Annual, which includes a Flesh story – presumably set before the main series – in which Reagan and Carver are actually sent back to the 19th Century Great Plains to bring in some vintage buffalo meat. Or maybe don’t check it out, as it’s terrible, almost certainly nothing to do with Mills – the writers of the Annual’s filler strips are mostly unknown – and has nothing interesting to say about the strip’s ideas.)

So Mills has two metaphorical frameworks overlapping here: the ecological one, of meddling humanity against the power of nature, and the colonial one, of cowboys re-enacting the annihilation of the West’s native fauna and way of life. The two are not a completely comfortable fit, mostly because they ask Old One Eye to be both the avatar of nature’s vengeance and a native war leader, an overlap which could easily slip into dubious territory if actually pushed. But in this book at least, the writers don’t go there, and the main priority of Flesh remains its grand guignol reckoning with Trans-Time’s hubris.

BASE UNDER SIEGE

In the Invasion entry I talked about story destinations – ways to end strips which were built to be of indeterminate length if plans change or reader distaste merits it. We don’t have many mentions of how well Flesh did with readers, but it seems to have been popular – even so, out of all the opening 2000AD line-up, this is the one which feels planned as a shorter-running story, with the climactic siege on the Trans-Time base very obviously where the strip is heading from early on.

I’d guess it wasn’t quite so planned, and it’s the skill with which Mills and Kelvin Gosnell build up and execute the siege that makes it feel as if the whole story has been heading towards this final confrontation with Old One Eye. It’s easy to imagine a bunch of shorter Flesh episodes and incidents along the lines of the tourist time train which gets attacked by dinosaurs – in a rare concession to decency, the strip has a spoiled brat tourist gobbled-up out of reader sight, but gobbled up he is.

But while there’s evidence for, and room for, the usual episodic chaos in Flesh, its actual brevity works strongly in its favour. As does the shuffle of writers and perspectives early on, with the comic not settling on its central conflict until several weeks in. It means the strip shifts quickly from early and effective world-building – like the flesh-dozer with its absurd maw of knives, as happy to mince and package careless workers as it is dinos – to a desperate, accelerating story as Reagan and company try first to warn, then to defend the base. There’s no time to pull the story away from its thunderous trajectory, which means there’s also no time to dilute the central ideas and themes.

The result is a comic that feels richer, denser and more thought-through than everything around it, bar maybe Judge Dredd. But the pace of Flesh means it manages to wear this richness very lightly indeed: its themes are certainly there, but the story also worked as a weekly dose of man vs dinosaur mayhem, with the typical Mills-influenced blend of trust-me-on-this creature info and bone-crunching savagery. It’s the first 2000AD strip where you fully realise how good it is when you read it as a whole, not on a Prog-by-Prog basis.

Flesh also has one of the great 2000AD endings. Mills, who finishes his dino-baby off here and scripts the last episode himself, is at pains to avoid the “King Kong ending” – a defiant death for Old One Eye against the human forces, even though that’s where the story seems to be heading. Instead, the humans are dead or defeated with an episode to go, and the strip turns into an elegy for the she-tyrannosaur, tracking Old One Eye’s final journey to the Tyrannosaur’s Graveyard where she will lie down and die of old age.

Mills teams up with Ramon Sola to make her passing a special one – and once again we see how important it is to have those extra pages of story, which give him the chance to draw out Old One Eye’s final journey across three pages of narration, including a “fatal heart attack” which leaves her being eaten by scavengers, at which point she simply gets up, tears them apart in one final Sola-drawn frenzy, and staggers on for three days before dying – “THE GREATEST MONSTER OF ALL TIME!”. And there’s more – a perfect coda set in a 20th Century museum which is hosting Old One Eye’s skull, letting Mills shift from triumphant elegy to black humour across these final pages and end Flesh on a last, gruesome punchline.

Flesh would return in little over a year, but there’s no sense of that from the closing episode here: the most original strip in the starting line-up had made its point and ended well. Strips ended all the time in British comics – sometimes hurried to a conclusion when readers turned against them, sometimes closing because their comic was marked for one of IPC’s endless mergers with another title. Flesh, though, gives every impression of ending deliberately, on a high note. A new, and apparently similar, monster story about a polar bear stood ready to replace it.

Flesh’s pace and brevity saves its execution from ever sagging, but the heart of its quality lies in its ideas. Everything else in the early 2000AD is either a revival of old characters or plots, or a crib from a popular film. Despite a bit of shared Hook Jaw DNA, Flesh really stands alone as a story with a high concept but also some delightful world-building. One of the best Flesh-related things is a full-colour page by Kevin O’Neill which ran on the back of the comic one week, framed as an advert by Trans-Time Corporation detailing the wonders of their Cretaceous farm. It’s an early glimpse for readers of the deliciously odd, cartoon-steampunk way O’Neill draws machinery, especially the picture of a plump Triceratops being lowered into the Flesh-Dozer. It shows the real enthusiasm and care the staff had for the comic in general and perhaps this odd little strip in particular. It’s also decidedly on the nose about the story’s themes, complete with a “MAN IS THE REAL MONSTER” text box conclusion next to a sweltering grotesque chomping into his dino steak.

You can imagine a Volgan propaganda poster, or a map of Mega-City One, or a Rules Of Aeroball info-page taking up space at the back page, but I think the fact O’Neill (presumably a colour page short) went with Flesh is telling. Flesh’s marriage of trashy exploitation and big ideas masks the fact that it’s 2000AD’s most straightforward science fiction story – SF not in the Dan Dare sense of a strip with spaceships and lasers, but in the more literary sense of something that extrapolates something about future society then builds a story around that. There is a lot of the “Sweeney-Fi” tough guy storytelling in Flesh – the two lead humans are even called Reagan and Carver, after Sweeney protagonists Regan and Carter – but the strip is also a harbinger of the turn to SF we’ll see in the comic in 1978, with a succession of short-run stories that have clearer SF roots. It’s no spoiler to say they have trouble matching Flesh’s impact: the Hag Monster remains undefeated.

HOW TO READ IT: The complete Flesh Book 1 and Book 2 (which will get its own post in the 1978 season) are available as a collected edition from the 2000AD webshop.

RECOMMENDED?: Yes! Flesh Book 1 is the best of the five launch strips and the purest complete expression of very early 2000AD, even if selected Invasion! and Dredd one-offs have it beat.

NEXT PROG: John Probe gives Britain’s enemies a bit of needle in M.A.C.H. 1! The most popular launch strip with readers, so it must be good, right? Right??

Flesh and 2000AD (c) Rebellion

WHICH THRILL? It’s 1999 and Britain has been invaded by the Volgan Republic of Asia. Bill Savage, a lorry driver, joins the resistance to fight the occupiers.

FIRST YOU MUST LEARN HOW TO SMILE AS YOU KILL

“Not having another obvious war to turn to at the moment, IPC has invented one, in which the Russians, thinly disguised as Volgans, obliterate Birmingham with a 50-megaton bomb, end Angela Rippon’s final broadcast at the point of a bayonet and kill Mrs Thatcher on the steps of the peoples tribunal of St Pauls. It may or may not do the kids any harm.” – Guardian editorial, 22nd Febuary 1977

So let’s recap. The first thing you see in a 2000AD story is an icon of the British future under fire. The Post Office Tower, a sleek, slim, confident symbol of the “white heat of technology” opened in 1965. 34 years on it’s dying, blitzed by the Volgan paratroopers who are ending Britain as readers knew it. A few pages later, a woman Prime Minister is executed: “Shirley Brown” is a clear lookalike for Opposition leader Margaret Thatcher. By the end of Invasion!, the sole barrier between your family and tyranny is Bill Savage, a lorry driver with a shotgun. It’s the perfect introduction to the 2000AD creator Pat Mills envisaged – a futuristic comic that drew its energy from the forces shaping the present: violence, technology, power and class.

If the expanded story length of the first Dan Dare episode was a way to show off Massimo Belardinelli’s head-expanding art, Invasion! Part 1 is where Mills’ vision of 5- and 6-page strips really pays off in story terms. The sheer amount of ground that’s covered in the first episode – I’ve not even mentioned the royal family being evacuated, or the last free news broadcast – is astonishing. Birmingham gets nuked in one panel.

The density of action, and the craft with which set-up, stakes, and the hero’s situation are developed, are reminders of just how good Pat Mills could be – and how important he was to the early issues. With the Dan Dare post I was too busy introducing the blog to pay much attention to Mills, who created 2000AD, edited it through its critical first months, and wrote most of the first issue single-handedly. The story of Mills’ involvement with the comic is much told by many different people – most notably Mills’ himself, in his essential memoir Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave! There’s no real dispute about the basic facts, though. Mills was at this point a freelancer with a formidable rep, having launched the highly successful Battle and Action for IPC. He was hired to develop a science fiction comic after IPC staffer Kelvin Gosnell wrote a memo which persuaded the Youth Group bosses that such a thing might work, at least briefly. Mills worked his arse off to make the new comic a success (and justify his unusually high freelance salary for the project) and 2000AD is inseparable from the Millsian vision of what an SF comic could and should be.

One important part of this vision for an SF comic is that it wasn’t specifically SF. Mills has written great science fiction stories for 2000AD but his most acclaimed and lasting strips for the comic, Nemesis The Warlock and Sláine, are weird science-fantasy epics (whether this is just genre hair-splitting we’ll explore when we get there). More to the point – since those stories would be impossible to imagine in this initial phase of 2000AD – his insights into what a strong 70s boys’ comic should read like are genre-neutral. The one genre-driven difference in approach between Battle, Action and 2000AD is Mills’ choice to run longer strips which would allow more spectacular visuals, a key element in science fiction’s appeal. As I said in the Dan Dare post, it’s hard to emphasise enough how important this decision was. But it sits alongside the ideas Mills carried over from his other launches.

What were they? The most basic one is that the TV kids were watching – especially the TV not designed for them to watch – was massively more exciting than what comics were providing. The other is that the mass of working class readers in Britain had no adventure comics which reflected their own lives, families and backgrounds. British adventure heroes still acted like public schoolboys, even if they weren’t: and American imports were too remote and fantastical to appeal (Mills has never hidden his contempt for superheroes).

These ideas set the tone of all Mills’ 70s comic launches for IPC, and they shape what 2000AD is. Start with the title, chosen as a year the comics’ readers would assume they’d live to see. If Dan Dare is delivering on the wild intergalactic promise of SF, the rest of the comic is firmly grounded in the present – while Invasion! is supposedly set 20 years in the future, only a couple of its stories imagine any kind of near-future tech advances (a Channel Tunnel! Savage disapproves), and the landscapes and characters are familiar to any 1977 reader. Because the centre of Mills’ vision for 2000AD was the idea of anti-authoritarian, working-class characters readers could recognise, the social order in the strips had to be a close match to the present. Very few, if any, 2000AD strips, take place in a Utopia: precious few in a world where there’s been any noticeable progress.

YOU’RE NICKED

Mills’ ideas are instantly visible in Invasion!, even when he hands the scripting over to Battle alumnus Gerry Finley-Day with the second episode. The most important thing in those early episodes isn’t Bill Savage’s early skirmishes with the Volgs – it’s obvious how those are going to turn out. It’s the way Finley-Day sets up his relationship with his supporting cast in the British Resistance, notably the ex-army officer Peter Silk. Silk and Savage contrast in exactly the way their names suggest: one dapper and smooth (he’s rarely seen without his sunglasses, a useful visual shorthand given how often the artists change), the other rough-edged. But this isn’t a double act. Silk may be the most competent of the ex-army guys Savage teams up with, but that isn’t saying much: he’s less dynamic and energetic than Savage, and his main role in the stories is either to fail to do something Savage pulls off, or to doubt Savage’s abilities and be proved constantly wrong. 

In other words, the conflict in Invasion! Isn’t just “will Savage stop the Volgs?” it’s “how will Bill stop the Resistance screwing up?”. The battle against the Volgs is the macro conflict of each episode, but the tension often comes from class conflict – the pessimistic professionalism of Silk and other military Resistance types with the working-class bottle and nous of Savage’s many friends and contacts. Savage is the Millsian anti-authoritarian hero par excellence – he resists the illegitimate authority of the Volgans, but also shows up the remnants of legitimate authority for the joke it is.

Invasion! is one of what Kevin O’Neill later called the “Sweeney style” stories of early 2000AD, after the hugely successful and influential 70s British cop show. The Sweeney’s great innovation in a crowded genre was toughness: its Flying Squad protagonists were hardmen and Ian Kennedy Martin’s show worked hard at staying true to the realities of policing. It was one of the shows which persuaded Mills that kids’ comics were having their lunch eaten by TV, which could provide action, violence and drama on a level way beyond where the cautious, censorious IPC were willing to go.

2000AD’s troubled predecessor Action is more obviously in the tough-TV style, but it carries over strongly to the Prog too. As we’ve seen, Mills’ decision to run longer strips meant a broader canvas for the toughness, so stories could sell moments of extreme action better – that opening splash page of the attack on the Post Office Tower is a brilliant example, difficult to imagine in a 3-pager. But the most obvious feature of the Sweeney strips is their protagonists – remorseless, rule-defying, tough as hell and magnetically appealing to readers. Protagonists like Bill Savage.

Of all 2000AD’s tough-guy protagonists, none carry their strip to the degree Bill Savage does. Judge Dredd, and later on Rogue Trooper and Strontium Dog‘s Johnny Alpha, are guys you enjoy seeing get shit done but they exist in extraordinary worlds full of extraordinary characters, and the stories can always take the focus off them and show the reader those things. Bill Savage operates in plain old Britain, albeit occupied – there is no wonder to be found in anything the Volgs can do, so the thrill of Invasion! is all about seeing Bill Savage take them out in wildly imaginative ways. Given the chance to do a story about a one-man army, Finley-Day absolutely goes for it – the gonzo pleasure of Invasion (well captured in the excellent Space Spinner 2000 podcast) is in seeing Savage yell about “ME CANNON” and blow Volgs away even when he’s in the bath.

Tough guys were the concrete in which 2000AD was anchored. But the Sweeney model was not an inherently comfortable fit with science fiction. For one thing, as we’ve seen in Dan Dare, there’s an implicit strangeness to SF which Sweeney strips don’t hang well with – the Belardinelli or Kevin O’Neill factor where you needed to find stories on which artists could go wild and deliver fantastic visions you could never see on TV. But even beyond that, the Sweeney model strips in Action had prided themselves on a kind of realism: Look Out For Lefty!, one of its sports strips, hit harder for its relatively true-to-life portrayal of fans, hooligans, and on-pitch aggro. 

But this was obviously much easier in a real-world story. The ways detectives Regan and Carter in The Sweeney itself step over the line have dramatic weight because everyone broadly understands and recognises the context; they know there is a line. In what I’m going to call Sweeney-Fi, the 2000AD-native mutation of the style, that context is just another thing you have to establish. And realism in a boys’ adventure strip with an action hero is a difficult ask anyway. For all its vernacular vigour, Invasion! still wants you to buy the idea that one lorry driver with a shotgun can make a meaningful difference in a totalitarian Britain. 

GERRY’S WAR

That’s not impossible, but it’s a difficult line to walk. It foregrounds one of the big questions about serial comics: the question of where a strip is going. This problem is familiar in Marvel and DC Comics through what Stan Lee notoriously called “the illusion of change”; the fact that these stories need to continually entertain, and can promise major shifts in the status quo, while never evolving too far away from their basic premise. The illusion of change is a problem of success – it hits when a long-running character becomes well known and successful enough that a template version exists in the public or fan mind, and changes to that template become difficult to make. Though not impossible – it would be hard now to imagine a version of Lois Lane who didn’t know Clark Kent’s secret, but this isn’t the relationship the characters had before the early 90s.

2000AD will run into illusion of change issues eventually, but because it’s a problem of success the only strip where that’s initially a factor is Dan Dare, and there you could argue that the fact a version of Dare exists in the public eye is what gives 2000AD their repeated opportunities to try and make their take work, at the same time as ensuring it probably won’t. So the problem 2000AD has early on is slightly different – more an illusion of momentum. At this stage most 2000AD strips aren’t designed as complete stories; they’re premises within which stories can be told. The question is whether that premise has a destination – an end point towards which it’s working, or trigger elements which can finish the story in a satisfying way in case the reader polls turn bad and the strip (or frankly the comic) has to pull the shutters down. And if it does have a destination, how do you vary the week-by-week storytelling enough to keep the wheels spinning for however long you’re given until you get there?

Invasion! is a war story, and most war stories have a very obvious historical destination which makes them the kind of strip that’s easy to end well. A strip about a platoon fighting their way across occupied Europe after D-Day has an ultimate endpoint which everyone knows, but can fit in umpteen escapades on the road to victory. Gerry Finley-Day’s spin on this well-worn concept for Battle, D-Day Dawson, adds another trigger element – his hero has a bullet lodged close to his heart, Tony Stark style, which will ultimately kill him (And did, despite the strip’s popularity – not the last time a Finley-Day war story would hit its foretold end with stories arguably left untold).

Finley-Day was a specialist in war stories, and an old hand at sustaining a series via the illusion of momentum, ringing the changes on a basic episodic plot as the overall structure inched forward. But in a future war story this is a slightly different challenge. Wars have histories; future war does not. As the story of the Volgan occupation of Britain, Invasion! is working towards an implied end. Bill Savage’s one-man war can’t be the turning point in that story without compromising the (fairly tenuous) claim to gritty realism that makes the Sweeney-Fi approach stand out; and the scope of the strip can’t expand too far away from Savage to tell the wider story without spoiling its anti-authoritarian appeal – even Peter Silk never gets any kind of spotlight.

So Invasion exists for its first few months in a state of hamster-wheel motion, in which Savage can pull off outrageous, against-all-odds wins against the Volgs every week but in which the wider course of the occupation is oblique. It’s a credit to Finley-Day that he pulls this stasis off so well: Invasion is so brutal, exciting and imaginatively plotted at the episode level that you simply don’t care about the overall story. This is one of Finley-Day’s great virtues as a writer – he’s a master of the adventure story equivalent of the locked room mystery: you give the reader a problem, and the equipment or characters to solve it, and part of the pleasure is guessing how it’s actually going to pan out.

With Invasion, guessing wasn’t always easy. An example from late in the strip’s run: Savage, Silk, and the well-meaning but hopeless Prince John (the heir to the throne who Savage is having to keep out of Volgan hands) have ended up at Balmoral, a Volg patrol hot on their heels. Savage is out of ammo, so they hide out in the Prince’s boyhood den, in which there are blank shell cartridges and a stag’s head. Someone has tipped off the Volgs; our heroes are trapped. But Savage uses the blank shells to propel the antlers from the stag’s head at such speed they become deadly missiles, spearing the Volgs. Britain is safe for another week!

As that summary suggests, Finley-Day’s stories became a little baroque as Invasion went on. One of the other great things about him as a writer is that he can turn out tight, formulaic war stories week upon week and then suddenly come up with some of the most bizarre plots in the entire comic. In one episode, a captured Bill Savage pretends to be obsessed with the Loch Ness Monster in order to trick the Volgan commander into a televised women’s wrestling match. Even better, this incident turns out to be the inciting story for Invasion!’s run to its climax, as the humiliated Commander Rosa plots her revenge on Savage and his friends.

But this means the second half of Invasion starts to pull further and further from its Sweeney-Fi beginnings, with the grit and gestures at realism falling back as Savage tours the country and gets involved in the Prince John plot – the most on-the-nose and yet absurd of all Invasion’s treatments of class conflict. Savage is still a tough guy – as series regular Mike Dorey draws him in the final story he’s a bruised, bloodied, snarling force of nature – but his story has slipped into fantasy.

As a weekly romp, that’s no bad thing – the second half of Invasion! is often ludicrous, but it’s even more entertaining and unpredictable than the strip’s first months, as Finley-Day delights in putting Savage in ridiculous situations, like spending several episodes undercover in a travelling circus. The art on the strip has settled down by this point, too. In the early parts it changes hands continually, and the only real consistency is the look of Savage himself, presumably because the artists had photo reference from Hell Drivers, the British 40s noir whose lead he’s based on. But later on Dorey and Spanish artist Carlos Pino switch in and out of the strip: I’m more taken by Dorey’s weighty, roughed-up figures, and his grimy, glowering backgrounds (a sooty effect created by applying an inky J-Cloth to the page!) but both artists produce dependably brutal work without Invasion ever being a visual highlight of the prog. (Dorey also has home advantage – European artists have a tendency to make the Britain of 1999 a little too picture-postcard)

So the art finds its range as the stories get wilder – a good combination for a strip. But Invasion!’s development shows some of the limits to the Sweeney-Fi style. From the opening episodes, it’s setting up a hard-edged, take-no-prisoners saga of a country under occupation, but as the rest of the comic starts to accelerate into strangeness and satire, Invasion’s more grounded storylines look out of place. Behind the scenes, as Mills explains in his book, the editorial team were beginning to notice a shift in readership opinion. The kids reading Battle and Action had been sticklers for realism, or what they understood it to be, dismissing apparently outrageous plot points as “stupid” (Mills gives the example of a dog wearing a gas mask in Battle, a real incident firmly rejected by the readers). But 2000AD readers didn’t have the same concerns, and while the anti-authoritarian tone of those early strips thrived, the one-foot-in-the-real-world approach gradually fell away.

(Mills himself recognised that the strip he started was something of a missed opportunity – he came back decades later for a new series following up on Savage’s adventures in a style suited to 2000AD’s now more adult readers.)

BLOC SHOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS

Invasion’s credentials as a tough near-future strip were undermined from the beginning, though, as the most notorious story about its development showed, a story that puts the spotlight on the question: what, if any, are this story’s politics? The Volgans are, transparently, meant to be Russians, and Russians they actually were until two days before press, when IPC Youth Group head John Sanders last-minute nerves led to frenzied pre-publication art corrections by Kevin O’Neill. 

The switch wasn’t, as far as I know, down to any specifically political misgivings: it’s more a symptom of a general nervousness around the comic’s launch in the wake of the Action furore. Why make rods for your own backs? As it turns out Sanders’ misgivings were both accurate and pointless. Everyone realised the invaders were Russian. 2000AD got disapproving coverage from the Guardian, who felt it not quite in the spirit of the Helsinki Accords, and a helping of harmless publicity with Sanders insisting in interview that no, the Volgan Republic of Asia was something quite different.

But the inability to have the Volgans be what they transparently were does change the strip. Even if it’s an obvious figleaf, it’s one which blunts the story’s violence and its connection to real-world politics. And Britain-invaded stories are always political, whatever else they are. The genre’s origins date back to the late 19th Century and the wave of invasion literature kicked off by 1871’s The Battle Of Dorking, with the most famous SF contribution being, of course, War Of The Worlds. (Michael Moorcock, who wrote a letter deploring the state of British comics in response to the Guardian piece, published an anthology of Edwardian invasion fantasy later in 1977 including Saki’s “When William Came”) 

Boys’ papers in the run-up to World War I enthusiastically took up the theme, with the Daily Mail’s Viscount Northcliffe’s stable leading the charge. The Northcliffe papers ran a barrage of stories called things like “Britain At Bay”, “The Peril To Come”, and simply “Doom”. Working-class heroes like Bill Savage didn’t feature much. But the thrust of the stories was as clear as the thunderous campaigns in Northcliffe’s newspapers, and as highly politicised – Britain was under threat; it desperately needed to arm itself and be prepared. Invasion literature was immensely popular even though it could never admit to one truth behind its appeal – that this was a guilty nightmare of its European neighbours doing to Britain what Britain had done to so many other parts of the world, and a fantasy that we, unlike the places we colonised, would throw off the invading yoke.

It was maybe a vague memory of this blood-and-thunder approach – and its presumed effect on sales – that prompted John Sanders to suggest a Russian invasion story in the first place. Mills, as Sanders tells it, had more misgivings and was only persuaded by the promise of executing Thatcher in episode one. So the switch to Volgans was both cosmetic and meaningful – even though it fooled nobody, it removed the most obviously provocative elements of doing a literal Soviet invasion story in the middle of the Cold War, a comics equivalent of 1984’s Red Dawn. 

The sting of controversy was drawn enough that the Soviet Embassy press officer, Valery Zemskov, was magnanimous about the bait offered: “It does not matter which country this comic reminds us of”, he told the Guardian, while offering some general bromides on the purpose of children’s education.

Zemskov’s comments aligned with the Guardian’s general position on the comic, which was more rooted in concerns about the existing traditions of war comics than in whatever 2000AD was actually trying to do. The assumption the paper made was that British comics were beginning to run out of things to do with the Nazis, and were casting around for another viable foe: the worry was less around Invasion! itself, but at the idea it might represent a new, ongoing front in Cold War propaganda, in the way “Britain At Bay” and “Doom” made their own small contribution to the drumbeats of war in the Edwardian era. Would the boys’ comics of tomorrow be full of villainous Russkies? 

In fact the opposite happens – the change means the Volgs are a generic war story enemy, which means, essentially, the Nazis (tiny echoes of the original premise survive quite late on – like the Volgans rubbishing British circuses compared to the ones back home). But the switch adds an air of unreality to the story which Finley-Day’s later, wilder plotting happily runs with. In one way, that unreality is helpful: Invasion! is not really meant to be taken seriously as a piece of near-future SF. Its backstory, at least in this original run, is a machine for putting the one-man-resistance-fighter pieces in place. But you can figure out the context easily enough from what we do see, i.e. a European war with a limited nuclear exchange which results in Volgan control of a weakened Europe and Britain. The obvious question here is – why is NATO so feeble? You have to assume that it’s broken down, perhaps with an isolationist US regime giving tacit permission for the Volgan Republic to expand its sphere of influence. Mills filled in a lot of the answers to this in his later Savage strips, and this is one of the parts of early 2000AD that seems somewhat more credible in 2024 than in 1977.

Ultimately the week-on-week politics of Invasion don’t have much to do with the Volgans at all; they’re not operating on the macro level of international relations as the micro level of representation. After a good few stories knocking around the Volgans in London, Savage hits the road, crossing Britain from the Cheddar Gorge to the Scottish Highlands and meeting up with dockers, miners, oilmen, loggers and circus folk as he goes. All of them, naturally, prove a great deal more useful than the officer-led ‘official’ Resistance.

In Action, every week, a member of staff would pop up somewhere in Britain ready to give the first reader to spot him five pounds (an old trick, dating back at least to the Daily Express’ Kolly Kibber in the 1930s). Tharg was fairly generous with his payouts to readers but he eschewed that kind of localised gimmick. But perhaps Bill Savage’s tour of Britain served a similar purpose, emphasising that even in a science-fiction comic the regions of Britain had a part to play. It’s also a way of spotlighting a range of working men as the backbone of the UK resistance.

And for me this is Invasion!’s legacy in the comic, and the legacy of the whole ‘Sweeney-Fi’ style. Invasion! is a wish-fulfilment comic of sorts; it asks you to imagine what you would do if your country was invaded, and lets you dream that you would be as ruthless and resourceful as Bill Savage. And unlike Dan Dare, Bill Savage could be you, or more likely your Dad. So could his motley friends who show up from trades and in places where comic heroes don’t usually come from. Which opens doors, as while 2000AD moves away from contemporary and near-future settings it keeps this idea of everyday, working-class SF heroes . If a lorry driver and a lady wrestler can be the heroes of a science fiction comic, so can a sewer robot, or a Birmingham pipe-fitter, or an unemployed girl from the 50th century, or a time-lost Camden layabout. So can anybody. 

HOW TO READ IT: Every episode of Invasion! is collected in a bumper edition available on the 2000AD webshop.

RECOMMENDED?: Episode 1 is a masterclass in setting up a series. After that almost any random episode is extremely entertaining, but it’s best dipped into rather than read in one sitting.

NEXT PROG: It’s FLESH! The story that proves 2000AD wasn’t just about outrageous levels of violence, it could handle themes and ideas. AND outrageous levels of violence.

Invasion! and 2000AD (c) Rebellion

This is a part of Discourse 2000, a blog looking at 2000AD story-by-story. It will include spoilers for all stories under discussion.

WHICH THRILL? Dan Dare was the “Pilot Of The Future”, now woken from suspended animation to battle alien evil in the 23rd Century.

OUT OF TIME

The first thing you see in a 2000AD story is an icon of the British future under fire. The Post Office Tower, a sleek, slim, confident symbol of the “white heat of technology” opened in 1965. 34 years on it’s dying, blitzed by the Volgan paratroopers who are ending Britain as readers knew it. A few pages later, a woman Prime Minister is executed: “Shirley Brown” is a clear lookalike for Opposition leader Margaret Thatcher. By the end of Invasion!, the sole barrier between your family and tyranny is Bill Savage, a lorry driver with a shotgun. It’s the perfect introduction to the 2000AD creator Pat Mills envisaged – a futuristic comic that drew its energy from the forces shaping the present: violence, technology, power and class.

But Invasion is not the headline story in 2000AD. The cover of Prog 1 is dominated by the free gift of a “Space Spinner” frisbee, the latest bit of plastic tat that publishers IPC traditionally used to pull in readers and get a new launch off to a strong start. At the centre of the spinner you see a little green head – this is Tharg, 2000AD’s alien editor. In the tiny gaps left around the edges of the toy there’s room for a couple of story trailers (“STOP PRESS: GREAT BRITAIN INVADED”). And top billing goes to “The New Dan Dare”.

Dan Dare is a marquee name alright, a venerable one at this stage, 27 Earth Years old. He’s your Dad’s space hero, his endless tussles with The Mekon the star attraction of a generation-old, long-cancelled comic that was founded by a vicar to mix education and excitement. Violence and power are not Dan Dare’s direct concerns, and as for class? He and Bill Savage might not quite see eye to eye. What on Mars is he doing in 2000AD?

Hold that thought, Earthlet Reader, while we do the intro.

WON’T IT BE STRANGE WHEN WE’RE ALL FULLY GROWN?

History is written by the winners, and 2000AD has comprehensively won the history of British adventure comics. By the year 2000 it was the last man standing from a once-thriving industry of boys’ adventure titles, even if it was dragging itself half-dead over its own dateline, like Judge Dredd at the end of “The Cursed Earth”. 24 years on – more than half its history! – and not only does ‘the Prog’ endure with uncanny stability, but 2000AD’s publisher Rebellion exists as a kind of British comics Valhalla, preserving, reissuing and refreshing properties from the 60s, 70s and 80s. Like Dennis The Menace turning into his own Dad, 2000AD has gone from the bratty upstart of UK comics to the responsible custodian of their legacy.

2000AD’s central place in British comics now means its early history comes with plenty of myth and awe and teleology. It’s a hell of a story, and it’s had some marvellous tellers: British comics creators are a talkative, opinionated bunch. As the tale of 2000AD gets repeated and retold, there’s an understandable tendency to reduce it to a series of high points – legendary strips and characters which can still thrill readers today. There’s also the lure of an easy fit with other storied parts of British pop culture – 2000AD as a comics version of punk rock, which in this telling means a revolutionary break point from what had gone before.

Neither of these ideas are wrong, but they’re simplifications. 2000AD was a genuine break alright, but also a comic that built on and in fact compromised with its immediate predecessors. Dredd, Nemesis, Halo Jones et al. are the comic’s formative high points but they shared Prog space with dozens of other strips, which often tell you as much or more about the comic, its readers and the place and time it came out of. The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic soared higher than a space spinner on launch in February 1977, but it was also, for most of its first few years, at constant risk of absorption, cancellation, censorship and a dozen management whims.

I’ve wanted to write about 2000AD for years. It means a lot to me. It means a lot to most British comics readers of my age and a fair spread of years around that, I’d guess. A lot of my aesthetic sensibilities, in comics and frankly beyond them, are rooted in what 2000AD did to me at a tender age. Acquire a taste for thrill-power when your brain is young and open and it never really leaves. This blog is my attempt to do right by the comic.

Its format is simple. I’m not a historian in the archival, dates and interviews and reconciling sources sense. This is a critical history of 2000AD, in that I’m arranging its entries so they tell a roughly chronological story – but the emphasis is on criticism, which means I’m more interested in what appeared in the Prog than the details of how it got there. 

But I’m interested in everything that appeared. Each entry will look at a different strip; each strip will get its own entry. I’m taking 2000AD a year at a time, aiming to cover the first 10 years at least, and long-running features with multiple stories (most obviously Judge Dredd) will get an entry for each year. But something like Inferno, which starts in 1977 and runs into 1978, will only get the one write-up. Sometimes the entries will stick closely to a discussion of the strip; sometimes they’ll range more widely. Britain in the late 70s and early 80s was a volatile, exciting place, even as it was also tacky, venal, and nasty. There’s a lot going on.

The adults who made and managed 2000AD had fiery opinions on the comic (and on Britain), not always matching. Pat Mills’ originating vision of 2000AD as a comic with aggressive, anti-authoritarian working class heroes and visceral action stories is at the heart of the comics’ development, and alongside mordant Scots satirist John Wagner and war story specialist Gerry Finley-Day his voice drives the early comic. But there are other, competing, visions that emerge over time. Science fiction itself is changing rapidly in the late 70s, and so is SF fandom, and that more fannish perspective pushes the Prog along too. As the comic begins to settle into its niche, it attracts older, hipper readers – much as early Marvel did in 1960s America – and it also lures writers more attuned to that sensibility, like Sounds cartoonist Alan Moore.

Set against that are the ways 2000AD was in continuity with the rest of the British comics industry, particularly its parent, publishing giant IPC. It gradually attracts a golden generation of radical, individual British artists, but a lot of its early look is defined by Spanish and Italian creators, who found work across the IPC range, drawing war stories, sports yarns, tales of romance. As with the Brits, 2000AD rewarded – in a reader popularity sense more than an economic one – the most individual European visions. The comic is unimaginable without Carlos Ezquerra or Massimo Belardinelli’s work.

The writers, too, included many old IPC hands alongside Mills and company – sports specialist Tom Tully, for instance, or Malcolm Shaw, whose great gift was for fantastic melodrama on IPC’s girls’ titles. Meanwhile IPC management had very different ideas about what comics were and should be than anyone in the 2000AD offices. John Sanders, Mills’ boss, became a staunch admirer of Thatcher, particularly when it came to Trades Unions.

All these are topics we’ll return to. The broader point is that what 2000AD is, what comics are, and what science fiction is are ideas in constant flux, and for me, the way you understand those things is by looking at what makes it to the page, and trying to take those stories on their own terms, the failures as well as the successes.

One broader possible failure before we get back to Dan Dare. Every name I’ve mentioned so far in this blog is a white bloke. This will largely continue to be the case. If you come to British comics after looking at, say, British pop music of the same era, 2000AD seems ferociously un-diverse. This is a bit less true on the page, even if IPC’s strict publishing gender division meant a glaring lack of women characters. But IPC had strips with Black heroes, though they tended to be sports stories, and 2000AD was no exception to this. 

Even behind the scenes, 2000AD wasn’t entirely a white boys’ club. Recent excavators of 2000AD history have done extremely valuable work to restore the fame and raise the profiles of the first women to work on the comic. Jan Shepheard, for instance, made immense behind the scenes contributions to the look of early 2000AD as an early designer and art editor (she created Judge Dredd’s craggy logo, among other things). 

But appearances aren’t that deceptive.  Long-serving editor Steve MacManus tells a story of how he was awed to meet Julie Burchill in a lift: he wanted to introduce himself, but alas was wearing the Tharg outfit. It’s a funny story, but it makes you realise that 2000AD, unlike the music press, never had a Julie Burchill or a Caroline Coon or a Chrissie Hynde. In the specific case of Burchill maybe that’s no bad thing given her career since – but this is a major way in which the other cultural comparisons you might want to make to 2000AD don’t stack up. Punk rock had Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, Ari Up among its creative forces; alternative comedy had Dawn French and Lenny Henry. Those scenes were hardly perfect but the British comics industry was much less integrated: in this sense, comparisons like the punk one are 2000AD flattering itself.

I don’t want to single 2000AD out here – it reflected its industry, and its industry would not even have framed this as a problem (IPC girls’ comics were often, if not mostly, written and drawn by uncredited white guys too; early female Marvel UK editors were made to assume male pen names). Attempts to change were undermined by management anyway – Deirdre Vine became assistant editor of 2000AD early on in 1977 but was quickly reassigned to girls’ photo-strip paper My Guy. So I’m not going to hammer on this point every entry, but I wanted to make it upfront. 2000AD is and was a tremendous achievement. But one of the things it managed was to introduce fresh voices and perspectives into comics, and from that angle its lack of diversity on most axes is a real shame – it changed so much; maybe it could have changed even more.

BIRD OF PRAY

Dan Dare was a figure from a previous revolutionary era in British comics. Every new cycle of titles designed for mass appeal to boy readers builds on and reacts against the previous one – Eagle, Dan Dare’s home, was no exception. The model Eagle was pushing back on was the boys’ story paper, which mixed illustrated stories of Imperial pluck with educational and uplifting features. Invented by the Boys Own Paper in the late 19th century, this format was modernised by DC Thomson’s story papers in the 1930s – Rover, Hotspur, and others. By the 1950s, they dominated.

Eagle was a simultaneous step back and forward. Back, in that it was as explicitly didactic and Christian as the BOP ever had been, even if the vision was of a newer, muscular and relatable Christianity. But forward, in that Eagle was an actual comic, with unrivalled production values, meticulous story research and astonishingly high quality art. Founder Rev. Marcus Morris played up the respectable Christian angle to get it past concerned parents, but the contents sold themselves – particularly Frank Hampson’s gorgeous, clean-lined Dan Dare. Morris talked about how American horror comics had woken him to the potential of something more high-minded, but Eagle’s obvious contemporaries lay across the channel, with Spirou and Tintin magazine. Eagle’s luxuriant size and paper quality, its deft, detailed, illustration-standard cartooning and its balance of humour and adventure made it the UK’s answer to Tintin, with Hampson as its Herge.

Eagle was a landmark. It was also, according to 2000AD legends Kevin O’Neill and Alan Moore, “the dullest comic in Christendom”. The art of Hampson, and later Frank Bellamy, won deserved respect. But Eagle as a whole was, as Moore and O’Neill said, “middle class”, vicarish in its bones. As for Dan Dare itself, Elizabeth Sandifer, whose TARDIS Eruditorum is an obvious inspiration for this blog, has suggested that all space opera is rooted in imperialist fantasies, whether it endorses them or critiques them. This is certainly true of Dan Dare, born from the already collapsing Space Age dreams of a country struggling to wake up to the fact that it simply couldn’t afford to be important any more. (The struggle continues). Dare’s star-straddling Space Fleet is in sharp contrast to the cycle of bold plans followed by discreet, red-faced cancellations that make up the real 50s and 60s British rocket program. 

The last of these space projects was quietly put down in 1971, by which time Eagle had already gone to Earth. By now an IPC title, it was merged in 1969 with Lion, a couple of features from the old comic continuing to the new, as was the way of these forced marriages. Dan Dare, already reduced to a reprint, did not make the cut.

All this makes Dare’s headline status in 2000AD eight years later even odder. But the generation who’d grown up on him were culturally prominent now. Elton John recorded an ode to Dan on a 1975 album. The same year saw talk begin of a movie, which would rumble on for years, but influenced IPC’s willingness to bring the character back. One thing that comes across, though, is that while management were excited enough to tease a Dan Dare revival to the fan press in 1976, the creative team on 2000AD were a little lukewarm about his return. Some were actively unhappy – Kevin O’Neill dismissed Dare as being for “middle-aged Dads” – but most creators talk about him more with regret than resentment. Mills and others describe returning to the old Eagle strips not expecting much and being struck by how good Hampson’ and Bellamy’s stuff really was. But while they gave it several good shots with top talent, a feeling lingered that no, he really didn’t fit with 2000AD, especially as the new title started to build an identity of its own. 

STAR WHYS

But while 2000AD might not have wanted Dan Dare, it needed him. There were three reasons: the first is a negative one, but still important. As we’ll talk about in later write-ups, 2000AD’s radicalism co-exists with an atmosphere of intense caution at IPC. For one thing, IPC  management were far from convinced a science-fiction comic was a good bet. More importantly, the company had just dealt with bad publicity and censorious attention around 2000AD’s brashly violent predecessor, Action, and the new comic involved most of the same people. A big, safe name who parents might remember with fondness was at least some insurance against fiasco.

The second reason is that Dan Dare filled a real and crucial gap in the comic’s line-up. Ask people in 1977 what science fiction meant to them, and you’d most likely get replies about robots, aliens, spaceships, and time travel. There’s a time travel story in the launch Prog, but it’s more of a dinosaur one. But otherwise, there’s future war, future sport and future spies – all the IPC boys’ comics standbys, with a light sci-fi spin. Dan Dare is the only strip in 2000AD which is giving kids space, and aliens, and other planets. It’s the most visible sci-fi story in a sci-fi comic. The need for these elements will become more acute once Britain goes Star Wars crazy in 1978, but even by 2000AD’s launch in February 1977 hype around the film based on pre-release images is building. Dan Dare gets its first, none too subtle, mention of a Star War on the cover of April’s Prog 8: by his second story he’s picked up a shaggy humanoid companion with a “laser sword”, and as 1977 ends he’s using it on an evil Empire.

And the third reason 2000AD needed Dan Dare is Massimo Belardinelli.

Probably Pat Mills’ single best and most consequential decision in developing 2000AD was to move from the standard 3-page story lengths to 5 or 6. Fewer stories, longer episodes. This eventually allowed for greater depth of storytelling, should writers want it, but that wasn’t the point. The extra length was more a blessing for the artists: it meant they could stretch out, with half- and full-page panels to make the comic visually explode. And on the full-colour centre pages – the most valuable real estate in the Prog – artists were set free to design really eye-popping two page wide spreads.

Belardinelli understood the assignment, providing the first ever 2000AD with an incredible piece of work. A spaceship dominates Dare’s opening centre-spread: a vast cylindrical freighter running into desperate trouble in Jupiter orbit, as tendrils of energy reach up from the red spot of the planet, seeking to pull the ship down. Belardinelli draws space as full, a cosmic soup of weird energy, galactic filaments and stellar nimbuses lighting up the crowded spaceways. The colouring on the spread mixes solar yellow, eerie metallic blue and lashings of angry alien red, the shading on Dare’s crew shifting blue to red as they come within range of the planet’s malign power. Dare himself is seen inverted, falling between panels as he’s drawn into the Red Spot.

Belardinelli would become a mainstay of 2000AD until the end of the 80s. He cut his teeth in Italy at Studio Rosi, working on soft-porn horror and crime comics called things like Jacula. As part of a studio, he didn’t get individual credit – I’ve looked at the examples I can find online of Jacula pages, hunting for telltale Belardinelli poses; the round faces staring straight to camera; the straight limbs with sharp-angled joints. I can’t find any. It’s possible his anatomic idiosyncrasies developed later, as he leaned more into the side of his art that won him most fame and fondness in the UK: his rubbery, freakish, thoroughly alien creatures and his chunky, imposing, often battered space vehicles.

That first spread, just on its own, is a manifesto for the new comic – a statement, just as plain as anything in the 1950 Eagle, that this comic is bringing you things you simply cannot get anywhere else. Week after week, Belardinelli is able to cut loose on the centre pages – at this point he’s the only artist in the paper getting an on-page credit. The berserk tempo of Pat Mills’ and Kelvin Gosnell’s initial 11-part story seems mostly driven by the opportunity to give Belardinelli something new and insane to draw every week. The Red Spot coming to life! Dare hijacking a ship commanded by a Martian! The gloopily insectoid Shepherd aliens and their slug-like masters the Biogs! We’re still only halfway through, with a full-scale space war, an all-devouring mothership and a kamikaze plunge into the sun to come. With that story done, Belardinelli delivers yet another all-timer – a vertical double spread of Dan’s return to a 21st century London transformed into a verdant alien tourist spot.

There’s a lot to admire about the other launch strips in 2000AD in terms of concept and plot, but Dan Dare is where the new comic most fully delivers visually on the promise of thrill-power; Belardinelli’s psychedelic science-fantasy visions (allied to much tighter storytelling than he’s often given credit for) are like nothing a British kid could have bought prior to February 1977. Not all said kids appreciated this bounty: Belardinelli was always a divisive illustrator. His stylised, slightly stiff human anatomy works best as a contrast to the madness of his bulbous, misshapen, tentacular, comical alien bodies, but those bodies also faced criticism, as there’s always a disdain for representation which chafed with the more serious SF fan. Belardinelli’s art is spectacular, inventive, often gross and funny (the artist he reminds me most of is Basil Wolverton). His alien visions were so visceral an office rumour held he spent his evenings dissecting stray cats to get inspiration for the hideous biogs. But while his art can be as grand and cinematic as post-Star Wars tastes demanded, its grotesque, organic flavour was a harder sell for readers who wanted some level of illustrative realism.

THE DAN WHO FELL TO EARTH

Mills’ and Gosnell’s writing for Dare successfully bombards the reader with new ideas and wild visions every week, always giving their artist bizarre new things to draw. This means it’s badly served by collections, as it’s so breathless it can be exhausting – an issue shared with most of these early stories, which were never designed for collected reading. But the breakneck pace disguises a deeper problem: Dan Dare’s debut is all icing, no cake, dazzling events happening to a central character with no purpose. 

The strip as executed – dizzying alien adventure – fills a vital niche in the comic; but it’s almost nothing to do with Dan Dare as was. Mills opts for a scorched-Earth approach, ditching Spacefleet, loyal companions Digby and Professor Peabody, and really everything bar the Mekon, who shows up a few months in. All that’s left is the name, but the name actually holds back the strip from having much of an identity. Everyone else in 2000AD has a direction you get right away – MACH 1 and Dredd have jobs; Harlem Heroes and Bill Savage have an impossible goal; in Flesh the entire world of the comic is tilted towards a coming conflagration. But what’s the point of Dan Dare, other than to be Dan Dare? Who is this guy?

Mills has two possible answers for this, but before we get there it’s worth thinking about what he couldn’t do with Dare, because it fills in more of the lines around what 2000AD was. Mills didn’t just want to do a traditionalist Dare – the first set of pages he got in, from an unnamed Argentine artist, is detailed and cleanly laid out, with hardware extrapolated from real-world moon and space missions. But if a traditional space-adventure Dare still appealed to kids, Eagle wouldn’t have been axed the year men landed on the moon.

At the same time, there’s no way an iconoclastic Dare would have worked. By 1990 a dark, impotent version of Dare, drawn in poignant mockery of Hampson’s clean lines by Rian Hughes, would seem an obvious way to launch a new, adult British comic (the ill-fated Revolver). But it’s equally obvious this was never on the cards for the 2000AD version, firstly because the revisionist and fan-centric trends which allowed for treatments like that weren’t in place, but secondly because 2000AD was never an iconoclastic comic. With one exception – which we’ll get to in the Tharg post – its relationship to the boys’ comic landscape of the 70s, and to the rest of IPC, was impatient and sometimes contemptuous, but not adversarial. Mills, O’Neill, Gosnell et al knew they were creating something better than Tiger or Valiant, but they were no more hostile to them on the page than The Beatles were to, say, Frank Ifield. The objective was to create something relevant and exciting and fresh – any critique of what came before was strictly implicit.

So Mills had two solid ideas about how to make Dan Dare work in 1977. The first is to borrow Buck Rogers’ and Captain America’s origin story – we’re two years off Rogers actually showing up on screens again – and make Dare a man out of time, a 20th Century guy in a 22nd Century world. This cuts him off from the iconography of the old series and gives him a source of conflict, in the one-man-against-the-system mode Mills loved – Dan’s no-nonsense ways rub up against the complacent bureaucracy of the 22nd Century.

The problem is that the stories are so packed there’s barely time to establish this background – it’s not even mentioned in the opening episode, only in a data page at the front of the comic. And there’s no real space for the texture of the 22nd century to come to life – Dare may say stuff like “Meet a 20th Century weapon – it’s called FIST!” but it’s not like the 22nd century, with its instant-kill “mole guns” is any less of a violent place. There’s an unnamed bureaucrat who obviously has it in for Dare, court-martialling him after he saves the Solar System (ain’t it always the way?) but he’s transparently a device to make Dare a free agent by the end of the first story. And Dan is certainly tougher than the Star Trek derived spaceship crew he hooks up with for the main plot, but that’s mostly just because he’s a Pat Mills hero and that’s the contrast Mills liked to draw at this stage. The result is the wildest visuals and ideas in the earliest Progs, but backing up the most generic action (or indeed Action) hero.

Could there have been another way? Probably not – as we’ll see in 1978, the meteor that was Star Wars was about to hit science fiction, irreversibly deforming expectations of what a space adventure story was. But one possibility lies in the second way Mills tried to make Dan Dare distinctive, the way the new Dare is separated visually from his Dad-friendly predecessor: Belardinelli was told to make him look like David Bowie.

Now, there are conflicting accounts of how much this was actually followed up, and certainly readers coming new to 2000AD’s Dare don’t all go “aha! David Bowie!”. For one thing, you can reasonably ask “which Bowie?” The skeletal, cocaine-and-milk-fed David of 1976 isn’t out there punching Biogs, but there’s something of glam-era Bowie in the haughty, slim-faced Dare we see from Belardinelli – check the final panel of his first strip, in which Dare has a date with the sole woman supporting character in those first Progs (coincidentally or not, she’s called Ziggy).

The Bowie connection is intriguing because it’s a reminder that science fiction in the 70s had guises beyond what was obvious from film and TV. As an SF figure, Bowie feels strongly aligned to the New Wave – The Man Who Fell To Earth is an alien-as-alienation study; Diamond Dogs and Ziggy Stardust imagine glam apocalypses, sex and fandom as proper subjects for speculative pop; “the papers want to know whose shirts you wear” is a wonderfully Ballardian one-liner in a bleak New Wave short story.

2000AD, as Mills envisaged it, vigorous, populist and action-packed, was not best placed to engage with the self-consciously modernist New Wave. The closest the comic came at launch was Michael Moorcock writing to the Guardian to complain about it. But it was hardly aligned to traditional, Golden Age, science fiction either. And if the in-your-face tone of the stories wasn’t likely to excite adult SF fans, some of the settings and content was a lot more intriguing: time travel as a satire of capitalist exploitation in Flesh, or the fully mediated dystopia of Mega-City One, concrete islands and high rises and all. Dare-as-Bowie was a red herring, but it was a reminder of possibilities beyond the adventure strip, beyond even Star Wars. The New Wave is a door left tantalisingly ajar.

ANOTHER TREEN WORLD

Belardinelli would have drawn the hell out of fleas the size of rats and rats the size of cats but his actual next assignment was rather more obvious: the Mekon. As soon as 2000AD launched with Dan Dare returning, a Mekon story was inevitable. No need for a makeover here – Frank Hampson’s design for the villain is unimpeachable. But conceptually, while Dan Dare has adjusted to a violent new future (so much so that the conceit of his jump forward in time is barely mentioned again), the Mekon feels an uncomfortable addition. Like Dare himself, the Mekon has lost his original entourage – Venus and the Treens are long gone. Instead incoming writer Steve Moore wastes no time in pairing him off with a second antagonist, two-bodied warlord the Two Of Verath. Moore and Belardinelli seem far keener on their creation than on Hampson’s, who gets almost no memorable scenes and is fooled repeatedly by the feeblest of ruses. Even his reunion with the hated Dare is a damp squib, pointing up the change in the hero’s looks: the Mekon can’t actually recognise him.

Understanding why the Mekon doesn’t work in 2000AD’s take on Dan Dare illuminates something about 2000AD as a whole. The comic’s early style is ultra-tough characters and a furious pace of invention – something new in almost every story, every week. This combination means there’s very room for recurring villains, let alone an arch-nemesis, because when 2000AD protagonists get the opportunity, they make sure the bad guy won’t be coming back. The logic of the Mekon – an enemy who can return again and again to menace the galaxy – fits with American super-hero comics, not this violent new world. Dare and allies are molecularising anyone who gets in their way and sucking whole space fleets into the sun: why are they going to spare one scrawny dude who lives in a bowl? Even in 2000AD, the Mekon can’t be killed off, but he can be – and is – thoroughly humiliated over the course of Steve Moore’s story. 

But Dan’s victory is a pyrrhic one: with the Mekon vanquished, the strip takes its first break and comes back with its first major change of direction, less than 6 months into the new comic’s life. Gerry Finley-Day takes over as writer, and Belardinelli, whose art had lost some of its spark by the end of the Mekon saga, changes places with Dave Gibbons; the Italian going to Harlem Heroes sequel Inferno and the Heroes’ British artist taking on Dan Dare.

In theory it’s a great match, and it was something of a dream assignment for Gibbons, one of the few 2000AD creators who really liked and cared about the character. He drops the lanky Bowie element right away, styling Dare somewhere between the clean-cut hero of 50s Spacefleet and a beefed-up 70s action brawler. In comparison to Belardinelli’s psychedelic sci-fi visions, Dare and his supporting cast are aggressively unfuturistic, the kind of toughs you might see hanging around a boxing gym. Dare wears a donkey jacket, and looks more like he’s negotiating a tricky Isthmian League Cup tie than the far reaches of the galaxy.

As we’ll see, Finley-Day had been doing sterling episodic work on Invasion. His big idea for the strip is to send Dare on a Star Trek style exploratory mission but with a hand picked crew of violent rogues, all won over to Dare’s side by, in essence, him being harder than they are. These characters aren’t particularly interesting, and you feel Finley-Day hasn’t exactly stretched himself in their creation – there’s a pilot called Pilot, for instance. But it’s a viable structure for the tough-guy Dare the comic is still looking for.

I’ll talk more about Gibbons himself in the Harlem Heroes post and his Dan Dare run in the 1978 blogs, as it’s the 2000AD strip where the influence of Star Wars is most quickly and obviously felt. But it’s obvious early on that something’s not clicking. Gibbons’ work looks great, of course, but Finley-Day’s stories don’t try to take advantage of the hard SF edge the artist is bringing, and they don’t even follow on from the writer’s own hardmen-of-space set-up (Dare’s supporting cast quickly blend into a mass). Instead he gives us whimsical shorts that feel more like the Future Shocks the comic had begun to run, like a planet of vampires who invite Dare to a fairytale feast.

With a mismatch of concept, script and art, 2000AD’s supposed flagship strip heads for the end of its first year as something of a mess, badly in need of firmer direction. But it had done its job, giving respectable cover to the comic as it launched and found its own identity and footing, and giving early readers eye-popping visions courtesy of Belardinelli. Dare is no classic, and feels increasingly out of place as the comic develops, but it’s the booster rocket that got early 2000AD off the launchpad. This version of Dare is recognisable now as a typical anti-authoritarian 2000AD hero, but putting one into a psychedelic space opera didn’t click. To understand how this type of character worked – and why the comic caught on – we need to go back to that besieged Post Office Tower, and see one in his more natural environment.

HOW TO READ IT: The stories I’m talking about appear in Prog 1 to Prog 35. These are all collected in Dan Dare: The 2000AD Years Vol 1 available digitally from the 2000AD webshop.

RECOMMENDED? If you’re going to read any of these, the first Belardinelli story (Progs 1-11) is the one to go for, mostly for the cosmic madness of his centre-spreads.

NEXT PROG! Bill Savage takes on the FILTHY VOLGS in Invasion!, the launch strip that defines 2000AD’s distinctive style. Shotguns! Women’s wrestling! The Russian Embassy!

Dan Dare (c) The Dan Dare Corporation plc. 2000AD (c) Rebellion