There’s a lot to unpack. Personally, I’ve not really enjoyed much by Mills for a long time. Savage is mostly pretty good, but has some terrible character moments. Too much of his work is dripping in Ickeian conspiracy theory. And strips like ABC Warriors are like the background to a children’s cartoon, looping and looping before your eyes. He’ll argue the lack of ownership is why the ABC Warriors have got back together a million times; that doesn’t seem to stop, say, Dan Abnett constantly trying new things.
Sláine is more of an odd one. I couldn’t give a toss about anything after Horned God, up until Books of Invasions arrived. That felt like a real return to form in all the right ways, but then it all went off the boil again in the follow-up, with its ALL-CAPS SHOUTY NONSENSE. The lack of wrap-up for Savage will be a pity, mind. Still, it’s not like other 2000 AD stories haven’t just stopped, and perhaps Savage’s war was never really designed to end.
As for everything else, I do get where Mills is coming from. I work in publishing. I have sold on rights, in a manner that was writer-hostile, to pay bills. It’s shit when you’re exploited. But. I also did that fully knowing the business proposition being made, and it’s just the standard in the industry. WFH is standard in British and US comics too. There are outliers, but complaining that you’ve had to give away your rights seems like an odd one. If that’s a problem, why stick with 2000 AD until now? Why now pen something for Image? Or why not approach 2000 AD with the idea for a creator-owned series, of which there are several?
That memo, I think, gets to the heart of this, in that publishers do a lot of the legwork. So if you ditch that business model, the creator is left having to market their property, and deal with a slew of logistics. Mills is doing that now with Spacewarp, of course, and I hope he finds that to his liking. But this comes with much greater risk—not least in the current COVID era.
I have a lot of respect for Mills’s work in creating 2000 AD. Without him, the comic wouldn’t exist. He was a key figure in shaking up the industry, and providing a foundation that also helped revolutionise US comics. (Although I also do feel his story sometimes overshadows others who were also instrumental in the success of the Prog and beyond.) I’m less keen on airing dirty laundry, and the conflation of past and present; all those little digs at Rebellion and upset about payments from the partwork (stuff like that never pays well), and so on.
It’ll be interesting to see what Matt Smith does. John Smith’s properties were dished out, to varying degrees of success. To my mind, Aleš Kot’s Devlin Waugh is the only one so far that really gets the voice of the original. (Kek-W’s Indigo Prime came close.) But it’d be a brave editor that gave someone else Savage, Sláine, or ABC Warriors, given that they have been almost entirely written by one person since the very beginning.
Finally, on the notion of creating a comic for all ages, rather than adults: that’s a fair point regarding 2000 AD. But then there’s a reason 2000 AD still exists: it grew with its core market. Given the current state of the newsstand, I think it’s naïve to think 2000 AD would definitely still be here if it hadn’t shifted, _especially_ given the lurch towards lad mag bollocks it made years back, severing its link with children’s comics. A reversion then would probably have killed the comic. But it also feels ironic that Mills seems pissed off about the all-ages thing when Rebellion’s doing Regened and bringing back old IP for comics that are seemingly aimed at a Phoenix-age audience.
Then again, it also somewhat feels like Spacewarp is a place for Mills do just do whatever he wants, in the manner he wants to (including some fairly problematic language regarding inclusivity). Still, all power to him for putting his money where his mouth is. It’s a brave move. But if he has now set fire to his old house, he can’t act surprised should he later need to return and all he finds are ashes.
