2000 AD in Stages

[Tiplodocus]

Prog 534 should be the start of a Phase.

Not 535 with the start of Zenith? (I wasn't happy with where this phase started, either. I felt kind of stuck with bad options.)

Apologies, poor joke. You don't remember the Prog 534 club? (For people bemused about us old uns always banging on about having read from Prog 1)

[TordelBack]

Ah, that!

[Dark Jimbo]

...the return of Deadlock, who we must suppose stopped being a subsumed aspect of Nemesis when we weren't looking.

That's presumably still to due to happen in the future, but the Warriors have travelled back through the Time Tubes to an earlier era, when Deadlock is still kicking around as his own bad self.

[Funt Solo]

...the return of Deadlock, who we must suppose stopped being a subsumed aspect of Nemesis when we weren't looking.

That's presumably still to due to happen in the future, but the Warriors have travelled back through the Time Tubes to an earlier era, when Deadlock is still kicking around as his own bad self.

I never thought of that! Curse Pat Mills (not really) and his timey-wimey shenanigans.

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I had entirely forgotten about the 534 club ... if I ever do a re-write ...

[Funt Solo]

Stage #16: Summer Magic (progs 571-588)

The comic struts confidently through the summer of 1988, declaring cool assassins and things that are well wicked (like the upcoming returns of Nemesis, Slaine and Zenith).




Rogue Trooper
Hit Two ends with an interstellar gang of assassins being set against Rogue. In the two-part (and cunningly named) Hit Three Rogue takes out another Goldfinger-style target with the slight twist that one of the henchmen he offs (unbeknownst to him) was an assassin targeting him. It's assassinception!
Rogue returns in 13 progs, continuing the terribly sporadic momentum of a storyline that started in 1985...

Strontium Dog
Stone Killers ends with Johnny and Red having fallen out and then the one-off Incident on Zeta moves Alpha to a meet with Middenface. The No-Go Job sees Middenface, his dug and Alpha join forces on a mercenary mission to the war planet No-Go. Unfortunately, this is a scam so that a Lyran sorcerer can retreive the bones of Malak Brood (from '83's The Moses Incidident).
Continues in the next stage...

Judge Dredd
Some regular fare in this stage with stand-outs being the fondly remembered Full Mental Jacket (running for five episodes) followed by the vital Bloodline two-parter. The latter introduces Kraken, an ex-Judda (from the epic Oz in the previous stage) and younger clone-brother of Dredd. Justice Department is attempting to deprogram him so that he can ultimately serve as a replacment for a disillusioned and aging Dredd. (Yes, he was considered aging thirty-one years ago.)

Summer Magic
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde meets The Hound of the Baskervilles featuring Harry Potter, except this is 1988. Luke Kirby is a boy who becomes his uncle's apprentice ... magician. Unfortunately for him this is more Tales of the Unexpected than The Railway Children, so great power also brings dark shadows of a doom-laden future.
Sort of returns in the next stage: not in the prog but in the first Winter Special...

The A.B.C. Warriors, The Black Hole
In this second part the Warriors battle each other in a conflict between order and khaos, eventually seeing through their differences to finish off the Monad and effectively save Earth by stabilizing the black hole bypass system. They then nick a spaceship and fly free.
The Warriors return in 1991's prog 750...

Bad Company II, The Krool Heart
In this second half of the second series, the quite compelling central plot is that the Krool Heart is going to be reborn - with someone jumping in to influence it, and thus influence all of the Krool thereafter. Who will it be?
The first series ended with no scope for a sequel. This second series has ended with no scope for a sequel. Series three begins in 1993's prog 828...

Tales from the Doghouse
Spinning off from Strontium Dog, this seeks to tell short tales of Dogs other than Alpha (or McNulty, or Red). Here we get Back-To-Front Jones and Tom "Birdy" Lilley. Both of these are just jokes about their individual disabilities mutations: so Jones keeps bumping into things because his head is on backwards and "Birdy" has wings but can't fly.
More of these in the next stage...

Tyranny Rex
Jonah and the whale meets Escape from New York ... in space!
More short-lived, throwaway chaos from Tyranny in the next stage...

Slaine the King: A Prologue
A three-page post-battle vision of slaughter with just these words: "...he didn't think it too many."
The three-part mini-series this advertizes starts in the next stage...

Tribal Memories
Brave New World meets apartheid... in space!
This is one and done, because it told a story well and then ended.

Nemesis the Warlock, Book IX: Deathbringer
Nemesis ... in 80s Britain!
This marks the end of the 80's sequence of books. Next we get a Nemesis and Deadlock tale in prog 700. We have to wait until 1999 for a Book X.

Hap Hazzard
Only Fools and Horses ... in space!
Returns for more short adventures in the next stage...

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References:
- Barney
- Strontium Dog : A Potted History (part 3)
- The 2000 AD ABC

[Colin YNWA]

"Only Fools and Horses...in space!"

GOLD!

[sheridan]

Rogue Trooper
Hit Two ends with an interstellar gang of assassins being set against Rogue. In the two-part (and cunningly named) Hit Three Rogue takes out another Goldfinger-style target with the slight twist that one of the henchmen he offs (unbeknownst to him) was an assassin targeting him. It's assassinception!
Rogue returns in 13 progs, continuing the terribly sporadic momentum of a storyline that started in 1985...

Making the three hits last roughly the same amount of time as Rogue's introduction up to the killing of the Traitor!

Summer Magic
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde meets The Hound of the Baskervilles featuring Harry Potter, except this is 1988. Luke Kirby is a boy who becomes his uncle's apprentice ... magician. Unfortunately for him this is more Tales of the Unexpected than The Railway Children, so great power also brings dark shadows of a doom-laden future.
Sort of returns in the next stage: not in the prog but in the first Winter Special...

Also pre-dating Tim Hunter from The Books of Magic...

Slaine the King: A Prologue
A three-page post-battle vision of slaughter with just these words: "...he didn't think it too many."
The three-part mini-series this advertizes starts in the next stage...

Isn't this the one that marks Glenn Fabry as an script droid?

Nemesis the Warlock, Book IX: Deathbringer
Nemesis ... in 80s Britain!
This marks the end of the 80's sequence of books. Next we get a Nemesis and Deadlock tale in prog 700. We have to wait until 1999 for a Book X.

Not forgetting The Shape of Things to Come and that three-parter about the Hammer of Warlocks (and a special/annual story or two).

Hap Hazzard
Only Fools and Horses ... in space!
Returns for more short adventures in the next stage...

I wouldn't have minded more tales from Fred's World (wouldn't be the same now, obviously).

[Funt Solo]

Nemesis the Warlock, Book IX: Deathbringer
Nemesis ... in 80s Britain!
This marks the end of the 80's sequence of books. Next we get a Nemesis and Deadlock tale in prog 700. We have to wait until 1999 for a Book X.

Not forgetting The Shape of Things to Come and that three-parter about the Hammer of Warlocks (and a special/annual story or two).

And I've fluffed this a bit: Deathbringer only has the first three episodes in this stage and completes itself sporadically in the next stage.

And you're quite right - although the next full Book is in 1999, we do get some content prior to that...

- Nemesis And Deadlock Warlocks & Wizards (700)
- Nemesis And Deadlock The Enigmass Variations (723-729)
- Bride Of The Warlock (WS4)
- The Good, The Bad And The Deviant (text; WS4)
- Shape Of Things To Come (824)
- Nemesis: Hammer of Warlocks (901-903)

[Funt Solo]

[Funt Solo]

Testing a layout theory...

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed rhoncus eros eget venenatis euismod. Ut suscipit massa massa, eu viverra ante convallis non. Curabitur ac maximus ipsum, eget luctus nisl. Nullam neque urna, mattis quis diam hendrerit, posuere venenatis justo.

[DrJomster]

Excellent use of excel there!

[Funt Solo]

Something I skipped with Tyranny Rex was the link-up with Indigo Prime that occurred in the 1988 Sci-Fi Special. This was published between In His Image (progs 566-568) and Under Foreign Skies (progs 582-584), and directly tied Tyranny into the world of Indigo Prime (which had first appeared in the guise of Void Indiga in the Future Shock A Change of Scenery in prog 490).

[Funt Solo]

Stage #17: Unstable Growth (progs 589-613)

In 1983 the 25-prog run 308-332 features nine different thrills. Here, as we cross over from 1988 to 1989, we have a 25-prog run featuring twenty-two separate thrills (including some reprint material).  Partly, this is due to the extra four pages, but that doesn't quite explain it: the prog has a problem with scheduling.

Back in '83, Skizz ran for twenty-three episodes and The Slaying of Slade for nineteen: each with a single artist, published with no prog breaks. The list of broken up thrills in this stage is a long one: Nemesis (Deathbringer), Rogue Trooper, Moon Runners, Tyranny Rex's Soft Bodies and Strontium Dog all suffer from what seem like scheduling problems.

Still, the prog feels exciting as it launches 589 with shiny cover paper, a second Phase of Zenith, an extra four colour pages (making eight in total, including the covers) and a thicker, thirty-six page comic. Those extra pages stay with us for a decade, and felt really exciting at the time. Unfortunately, due to the way the colour pages are printed, the strip that is honoured by them (usually Dredd) gets split over another strip, which lasts until prog 650.

Another key marker of this phase is specials content that ties into the narrative of the progs' thrills in a way that seems less peripheral and more core (to an extent that it perhaps hasn't in the past).




Zenith, Phase II
Zenith goes up against an evil Richard Branson surrogate while the story delves into the past and continues to masterfully foreshadow the future. It's a story full of wonderful touches: like when Zenith first tries to use telepathy and nearly mentally deafens Peter St. John. The second Phase introduces the idea of alternative universes, and that the war with the Lloigor is happening across the multiverse, and that superheroes in the know are part of a resistance movement battling the dark gods. The first Winter Special expands on this idea and also recaps the series to date with Interlude 3: Maximan.
Phase III begins in prog 626...

Nemesis the Warlock, Book IX: Deathbringer
Nemesis in 80's Britain sees Torquemada (and his nose-comfy) become a sort of new age Oswald Mosley as Nemesis continues to toy with humanity, to the increasing dissatisfaction of Purity Brown.
The next we hear from Nemesis is in 1990's prog 700...

Judge Dredd
The memorable Twister (progs 588-591) mashes up Dredd and The Wizard of Oz as a way of introducing the increased number of colour pages in the prog. We also get some more murderous sociopathic dyslexia action with What I Did During the Summer Holidays by P.J. Maybe (clearly riffing off Adrian Mole) and The Further Advenshers of P.J. Maybe age 14. The homages continue with Eldster Ninja Mud-Wrestling Vigilantes (601), we get poignant with Curse of the Spider Woman (603-604) and finally Our Man in Hondo introduces Hondo City, adding to the idea that each country has their own Judge force with a uniform to match. The list now includes the US Mega-Cities, the East-Megs, Brit-Cit, Oz and Hondo City.
Next stage beware: Crazy Barry is on the loose...

Slaine the King
The 1989 Annual has the Drune's invoke a dark god named Hu, who promptly starts eating his worshippers in The Arrow of God. The three-part Slaine the King in the prog sees Slaine lead the Sessair to victory in battle over the Fomorian sea demons, but in many ways this tale is simply introducing concepts for the next saga. The idea of the triple-aspect earth goddess is introduced, and the desire to seek out and utilize arcane treasures (the Spear, Sword, Stone and Cauldron) are declared as a way to unite the tribes and win the war.
It's just a short thirty-four prog wait for the first book of The Horned God...

Rogue Trooper
The one-off Through the Eyes of a Gun seems like it's another Hit, but turns out to be more Do Biochips Dream of Electric Sheep? We do then get the five-prog Hit Four: The New Moral Army, with more Thwack-Ye-Mole nonsense as Rogue runs headlong into another room full of Stormtroopers and manages to come up smelling of roses.
We are promised "Coming Soon: Hit 5 - The Queen is Dead", but that never materializes and, instead, we get an odd conclusion to the storyline of the Hit in the second Winter Special close to the end of '89. Before that, we get a different Rogue story (and a very well-regarded one) in the next stage...

The Daily Dredd [reprints]
Some reprint material from the Dredd stories printed originally in the Daily Star: here we get the collected The Mean Machine and Bride Of Death.
More in the next stage...

Tharg's Time Twisters 
The Twisters last appeared in 1984's prog 374, and return briefly here for the appropriately named Time and Time Again.
The next time it is deemed useful to use the Twisters super-title is in the 1995 Yearbook (published, of course, in 1994)...

Moon Runners
Triangle ... in space! It's sort of Ace Trucking Co. minus the fun. It's way more Babylon 5 than Farscape. (Switch out Babylon 5 for Andromeda if you're piqued.) It's like Star Trek: The Motion Picture as opposed to The Wrath of Khan. It's like The Postman rather than Waterworld (rather than Mad Max 2). On a scale of gently snoozing to amphetamine-driven altertness, it's been in a coma for twenty years. Like Blue Thunder instead of Airwolf (but in space). Like blatbugs instead of ughbugs. If all the references are a bit dated, then that matches the sexual politics: where women are allowed to own the space trucks spirit ships but not actually board them. And then all their clothes fall off.
There was more in the drawer, which gets published in the next stage...

Chopper: Soul on Fire
Chopper, now a mopey swagman living rough in the Oz radback, is still salty from losing Supersurf 10, to the extent that he times himself through the course trying to prove something (the big gallah).
Returns for Song of the Surfer in prog 654...

Tyranny Rex: Soft Bodies
A notoriously impenetrable enigma of a tale. Earlier stories made it clear that Tyranny was not someone to be messed with, but here she violently beats a hospitalized man to death in a fit of pique. But then the entire story (sans any explanation of what's actually going on) turns out to be a fictional version of events anyway, so did she really?
The next tale is in the 1989 Sci-Fi Special...

Strontium Dog
The 1988 Winter Special gives us Incident at the Birth of the Universe, where Alpha sends his enemy (who's about to destroy the nascent universe with his anti-matter eyes at the moment of the Big Bang) a few seconds into the past, where the universe didn't exist yet, and thus winks him out of existence. Three problems here: there's nowhere to stand, nothing to breath and (this one's the doozy) you cannot send someone into the past before the Big Bang because time itself didn't exist. Woah!

The opening seven episodes of The Final Solution follow on from The No-Go Job and have Brother Sagan take over New Britain and torment Alpha with the help of Lyran sorcery (and the corpse of old friend Wulf). If this was a soap, it would say "Introducing Special Guest Star: Feral". (Best not to mention that twenty-two years from now he'll be fattened up and ritually sacrificed by a bitter co-creator.)

Winning the award as the most disjointed thrill ever to grace the prog, this twenty-nine part epic is spread thinly, like Marmite, over eighty-seven progs and five segments, beginning in 1988 and ending in 1990. The next bite-sized morsel appears in prog 615...

Bad Company
The 1989 Annual has the full-colour Young Men Marching, a prequel of how Danny Franks got drawn into the war. Prog 601 had Ararat (aka Simply), another flashback tale but created as part of a charity event.
Another series starts in prog 828, way off in 1993...

Tales of Mega-City One
The one-page My Favourite Laundrette riffs on a celebrated advert of the era (from 1985).
No more Tales in the prog, but there is Mega-City Stories: Bazooka Bowl in Megazine 2.41...

Bradley and the Toboggan Race
An homage to the story-telling format of Rupert Bear where Bradley, Milton and Annabella go sledding. There's a Sainsbury's, so perhaps this is where it drops the idea of being set on an alien planet.
Next up is the sequence Bradley's Thesaurus of Modern Music, starting in prog 660. It was promised in "the new year", but I guess they didn't say which one...

Anderson, Psi-Division
The 1988 Winter Special has Colin Wilson Block, an alien possession investigation. The prog then has Contact, with more alien visitations and Beyond the Void (which reminds us that Judge Death is only a dimensional slip-up away).
Continues immediately in the next stage...

Night Zero
Taxi Driver meets cyberpunk in the hard-boiled Zero City: where finger-pistoled mercenary cabbie Tanner gets immediately embroiled in a case involving a (who'da thunk it?) woman in distress.
Continues in the next stage...

Hap Hazzard
A couple of guys chat about life and lie to women ... in space!
Returns in ten years for a last hurrah in prog 1164...

Zippy Couriers
Shauna McCullough is a zippy courier [see title], but it's difficult to make that career interesting, however you dress it up. Transporting thing A to thing B can be viscerally exciting, though. Take notes.
There are more of these in the next stage...

Tales from the Doghouse
Freddy 'Chameleon' Finegan breaks the mould set in earlier episodes by not just making jokes at the expense of each bounty hunter's specific disability mutation but then we revert to type with the tale of Edward 'Spud' O'Riley, who (wait for it) gets his chips.
More Tales in the next stage...

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Ace Trucking Co.
A final coda for this once-plentiful thrill comes in the shape of The Homecoming from the 1989 Annual, where Ace returns to his original universe to look up his old lugbuddies.
Next shows up in a cameo in another series in 1994...

Summer Magic
Dropping the original title, this is A Winter's Tale: A Luke Kirby Adventure, in which Luke discovers that another patriarchal figure in the family is a magic-user.
The next tale isn't until 1990's Sci-Fi Special...

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References:
- Barney
- Strontium Dog : A Potted History (part 3)
- The 2000 AD ABC

[Colin YNWA]

Wow that's really telling.The number of thrills there as you say is striking and 'Unstable Growth'  seems to be the perfect title as it sums up exactly what seems to be happening. Especially borne out my having (or choosing I suspose?) to run Daily Dredds in the Prog.

Loving the new banner.

[norton canes]

That Kano poster - the way he's holding the gun, it has to be based on a photo of a guitarist, no?