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2000 AD in Stages

Started by Funt Solo, 23 July, 2019, 10:57:01 PM

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TordelBack

Quote from: Funt Solo on 15 August, 2019, 01:39:58 PM...Alpha's possum ability...

Pretty importamt element in The Ragnarok Job/Rage.

Funt Solo

Stage #3.5: Tornado

Tornado ran (for 22 issues) concurrently with 2000 AD progs 105-126 before being merged with the longer-running title.





Victor Drago
Presented as a mixture of text and strip stories (4 of the 6 are text), these are the investigations of Baker Street residing, pipe-smoking detective Sherlock Holmes Sexton Blake Victor Drago and his assistant Watson Tinker Spencer.

The Mind of Wolfie Smith
Nondescript young man has ESP.
Continues with the 2000 AD merger of prog 127.

The Angry Planet
(Angry) Martian colonists battle corporate Cylon knock-offs intent on mischief.

Wagner's Walk
Panzer commander Major Wagner escapes from post-war Russian internment and attempts to walk [see title] to freedom.

Captain Klep
Klutzy superman knock-off causes comedic chaos, one page at a time.
Continues with the 2000 AD merger of prog 127.

Storm
Feral teenager of the Scottish highlands (aren't they all?) meets a Henry Higgins type: it's Wee Geordie crossed with Pygmalion.  Beano/Viz style episodic calamity ensues.

Black Hawk
It's Spartacus meets the Dirty Dozen as a nubian warrior leads a special Roman cohort accompanied by his familiar (and literal) black hawk [see title].
Continues with the 2000 AD merger of prog 127 and becomes something else altogether...

[Big E]
The first two are "Big E Specials" and the final two are photo stories in which Dave Gibbons gamely abandons any pretense at ego by dressing up as the superheroic titular editor.

The Lawless Touch
Johnny DiGriz Lawless is a thief turned secret agent who sometimes goes up against the Russians Volgans, making this a mash-up of the premise of The Stainless Steel Rat and the setting of Invasion.  (Set pre-Invasion, we can note the absence of any global flooding.)

Tornado's Gallery of Heroes
A poster series by Carlos Ezquerra that provides everything from Roman Centurions to Mek Warriors: really a warriors through the ages (and beyond).

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References:
- Albion British Comics Database Wiki
- Barney
- Touched by the Hand of Tharg
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

O Lucky Stevie!

Quote from: Funt Solo on 25 July, 2019, 07:14:12 AM
Dan Dare, Servant of Evil
I should confess that I'm not really sure what happens in this one: anyone else got a summary?
This is really it for Dare in the prog, although a version of him turns up in Revolver in 1990, and there's a Dan Dare 3000 AD in the prog 1034 supplement (but I don't own a copy).

You know how every sports strip written by Tom Tully revolves around a corrupt manager conspiring to kill the team as a tax write off? Dan Dare, Servant of Evil is that draped in Jim Starlin-lite cosmic disco drag.

"We'll send all these nasty words to Aunt Jane. Don't you think that would be fun?"

Funt Solo

Stage #4: Tornado Merger (progs 127-177)

The merger with Tornado (less than a year after the one with Starlord) seems less welcome, when all is said and done.  Starlord gifted us with Ro-Busters (spawning The A.B.C. Warriors and becoming a cornerstone of the Millsverse) and Strontium Dog (a thrill that, almost as much as Dredd, defines 2000 AD for many fans).  It's a poor comparison that Tornado gives us Blackhawk and The Mind of Wolfie Smith: which isn't to say they're terrible, only that they don't provide the same immediate inspiration and longevity.

And then there's Captain Klep.

This period is vitally interesting, then, in that it seems to have to shake free of the new merger, and as it does so (over 51 progs) we're introduced to some of the most important Dredd world characters ever devised alongside many fresh thrills that are a well-loved part of the 2000 AD canon. Progs 140 & 152 position themselves as jump-ons but the merger doesn't shake loose until the end of Wolfie Smith in prog 177.

Conspicious by its absence, Strontium Dog disappears for a stretch of 59 progs, but don't worry: Tharg has a plan...




Judge Dredd
Sov Judges were first introduced by Wagner (& Bolland) back in prog 50 during The First Lunar Olympics, and in progs 128-129 the Battle of the Black Atlantic sees Dredd and the Sovs cross swords again. We're also introduced to exploding mob blitzers (130), we hear Otto Sump's Sob Story (131-132), witness the effects of Boing, the miracle plastic, at the Palais de Boing (136), start our cravings for Uncle Ump's Umpty Candy (145) and Judge Dredd cancels New Year (146: my first encounter with 2000 AD).

You'd think that would be enough world-building, but then progs 149-151 introduce us to Judge Death and Psi-Judge Anderson.  All of this before Dredd goes on the hunt for The Judge Child, a hugely influential epic (giving us Judge Hershey and the Angel Gang) that sprawls into the next stage... 

Blackhawk
In Tornado this was historical fiction but 2000 AD has aliens beam the hero off Earth so that Blackhawk becomes "Once a Roman centurion - now gladiator in a savage alien arena!" (as the strapline from prog 137 has it). As if that weren't enough, he then gets his soul sucked out (by the aptly monikered Soulsucker) and quests to retrieve it.
Instead of the plot dead-ending it literally disappears down a black hole, but the premise (a Roman warrior in search of his stolen soul) serves as the kernel for Aquila (starting 32 years later in the special Prog 2012).  On far shakier footing, the sidekick character Ursa has a song: "My axe he chop with crunching thud, soon he be drinking plenty blood!"  Is there where the idea for Slaine came from? A couple of text stories show up in annuals and we get a one-off in the '82 Sci-Fi Special.

The A.B.C. Warriors
Most of the first half of this run (in the previous stage) focussed on back stories for some of the seven titular warriors: a re-designed Hammerstein from Ro-Busters, the beast-like Mongrel, the wizard Deadlock, the cowboy Happy Shrapnel, the sniper Joe Pineapples, the pirate Blackblood and the remains of Steelhorn as The Mess.

Having introduced the warriors, the second half of the sequence is free to have them "Spread the word!" in a collection of Seven Samurai themed adventures as the smaller force defends against the likes of the evil Biol Corporation: perhaps the strongest stories are Cyboons (progs 130-131) and Mad George (137-139).
We have to wait until prog 555 in '88 for the Warriors to return in their own series, but they do crop up prior to that in Nemesis the Warlock (in '84).

The Mind of Wolfie Smith
Inherited from Tornado: a young hobo with ESP and preternatural bad luck (in a thematic cross between Tales of the Unexpected and Sapphire and Steel.)
One could argue that "young man has special powers" also results in Luke Kirby, the Books of Magic, Harry Potter and, erm, The Phantom Menace: but Wolfie Smith didn't have legs in 2000 AD and is dropped.

Disaster 1990
A global flood requires that Bill Savage 'ave a word in various ne'er do wells' shell-likes.  Sorted!
This prequel to Invasion finishes here but Savage returns in a sequel to Invasion named (appropriately) Savage (starting with 2004's Taking Liberties in prog 1387).

Captain Klep
Inherited from Tornado: Captain Klep continues causing comedic chaos. Wearing its silly openly on its sleeve with sub-titles such as "The Case of the Five BANG! Six Dead Taxi Drivers", this fills the slot vacated by Bonjo.
Whilst this doesn't return there's a tenuous argument that it serves as a thematic precursor of sorts for Marshal Law in 1987.

The V.C.s
It's 'Nam in space, as the Vacuum Cleaners go up against the bug-eyed alien threat of the Geeks. Vape! Vape! Vape! The gritty ensemble of characters sets this apart from traditional hero-centric tropes: Trooper Smith is our focal point but instead of being the obvious hero, he's a fish out of water - an "Earthworm" to a crew of system-born veterans.
Not only does this return much later (starting in 2002), but the new recruit motif repeats itself in Bad Company ('86).

The Stainless Steel Rat
James Bolivar "Slippery Jim" DiGriz is the titular rat: an interstellar rogue that justifies (non-homicidal) theft on the basis that it's covered by (someone's) insurance. Carlos Ezquerra beautifully realizes this serialized version of Harry Harrison's space operatic novel.
So much fun that it returns later in this stage...

Ro-Jaws' Robo-Tales
The first anthology format to challenge Tharg's Future Shocks: here the gimmick is that each tale features robots [see title]. Gary Rice starts to shoulder writing duties as the series progresses, with memorable titles such as The Revolt of the Tick Tock Monkey Bomb (157) and Droids Are Dispensable (161).  Of particular note is prog 170's Killer in the Cab, by Alan Moore: probably his first script for the prog although his A Holiday in Hell (a Westworld homage) had been published earlier in the 1980 Sci-Fi Special.
More tales in the next stage...

Timequake
Time-traveling into the Tornado merger from the Starlord merger is typical behavior for the Time Cops, as they stop a final time quake from discombobulating the future.
Having published what was probably still in the drawer, Tharg leaves this one alone.

Robo-Hunter, Day of the Droids
Verdus had Same Slade defeat a planet full of robots and even though we knew he was a Robo-Hunter (a robot bounty hunter in the mould of Sam Spade, the private eye from The Maltese Falcon) we never got to see him on his home turf.  Here, he's back in his home city on a case that brings in the robot mafia (the God-Droid) and a plot where, as with Verdus, robots threaten to take over from humans (in this case with the help of the wonderfully cute but terribly threatening Teeny Meks).

Key to the Robo-Hunter mythos are the addition of Sam's idiotic assistant Hoagy and Carlos Sanchez Robo-Stogie (a Cuban cigar determined to help Sam quit smoking).  These foils form the comedic backbone of the strip for years to come.
We have to wait a couple of years for Robo-Hunter to return when he emigrates to Brit-Cit in 1982's prog 259.

Fiends of the Eastern Front
Vampires stalk the terrible World War II battlefields where the Germans invaded Russia in their (hubristically titled) Operation Barbarossa.
We have to wait 26 years, but get a second series in the Megazine in 2006.

MACH ZERO
The tale of a British Hulk is put to rest in the four-part The Final Days.
It's all they wrote.

The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World
The third rat novel (the second serialized by 2000 AD) sees the villainous "He" attempting to wipe out Jim's Special Corps by going back to the Napoleonic era and erasing their timeline. (There's a similar side-plot in a 1985 gamebook: Falcon - The Renegade Lord.)
We have to wait until 1984 for The Stainless Steel Rat for President.

Terror Tube
This bizarre one-off from Mills & O'Neill takes over the cover and introduces Nemesis (an alien freedom fighter unseen within his Blitzspear), Termight, the evil Torquemada and his Terminators.  Inspired by earlier tube designs (in Ro-Busters' The Fall & Rise of Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein) this was supposed to be first in a series of "Comic Rock" one-offs but instead serves as the launch pad for what would later become Nemesis the Warlock.
The next stepping stone towards Nemesis is Killer Watt (progs 178-179), and The Galactic Olympics collectible booklet uses an otherwise incongruous terminator/tube cover in prog 174.

No changes:
- Tharg the Mighty...More in the next stage...
- Tharg's Future ShocksMore in the next stage...



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References:
- The 2000 AD ABC
- Albion British Comics Database Wiki
- Barney
- Touched by the Hand of Tharg
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

Swerty

My favourite era of 2000ad by a country mile.

DrJomster

This was my starting point, with The Black Plague with the excellent Ron Smith on art droid duties. Just amazing stuff.
The hippo has wisdom, respect the hippo.

Funt Solo

The Proto-Millsverse

Pat Mills enjoys blending characters and stories through time and (because he had his fingers in many creative pies) his Millsverse also ties into the Dreddverse. Sometimes people produce timelines that try to make sense of it all (e.g. in The Judge Dredd RPG by Games Workshop in '85).

First of all, back in Flesh (Book I) we have Old One Eye (a T-rex) that begat (and later killed) Satanus, whose clone shows up in The Cursed Earth. Mills also explores a body horror aspect of this thread in The Blood of Satanus (progs 152-154).

Satanus begat Golgotha, who is taken to Mars and features in The ABC Warriors (134-136), itself a future spin-off of Ro-Busters (the link at this point being just Hammerstein). The Golgotha connection is recognized in the prog as being convoluted so prog 134 features a 1-page Flesh File introduction that explains the Old One Eye - Satanus - Golgotha chain.

Ro-Busters' The Fall and Rise of Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein serves as the inspiration for Terror Tube (the nascent start of Nemesis the Warlock). Earlier in Ro-Busters, during Hammerstein's War Memoirs, we see him fighting the Volgans.  They're the enemy (editorially censored Russians) from Invasion and, because they're now part of Hammerstein's history, they also show up in The ABC Warriors back stories (such as The Retreat from Volgow in prog 120).

Diagrammatically, then:

++ A-Z ++  coma ++

sheridan

Always time for a good diagram!

Colin YNWA

Quote from: sheridan on 17 August, 2019, 11:49:48 PM
Always time for a good diagram!

Yeah diagram and charts this thread is becoming the best every!

TordelBack

I'm sure I'm not the only one hoping this turns into a nice little PoD book...

Funt Solo

Stage #5: Going It Alone (progs 178-221)

Prog 178 sets out a stall: no more mergers!  This is now "2000 AD featuring Judge Dredd" and we get a new logo, a free gift and a fresh line-up with five key thrills: Strontium Dog, The Mean Arena, Judge Dredd, Meltdown Man and Killer Watt.  With the last of those only lasting for two progs, Return to Armageddon is drafted in and the roster remains quite stable throughout this stage (only being interrupted by filler strips).

Is this the beginning of the comic's first golden age?



Strontium Dog
Returning from a 59-prog hiatus, Strontium Dog kicks down the door with arguably the strongest run of the series.  Before things got grim and characters we loved started to die off we could just enjoy the thrill of seeing Johnny and Wulf on their bounty hunting missions (mixing up the commercial side of Wulf with the big heart of Alpha). Being able to sympathize with people hunters is one of the great strengths of the series.  Whilst all the stories here are powerful classics (Death's Head, The Schicklegruber Grab, The Doc Quince Case & The Bad Boys Bust) it's the seminal Alpha origin story Portrait of a Mutant that proves absolutely vital.
Returns in the next stage...

The Mean Arena
Parkour meets Rollerball.  In a hyper-violent near future close combat team sport, star player Matt Tallon seeks revenge for his brother's suspicious death.  Where Harlem Heroes focussed on the team, this wisely has a central hero and a dramatic question, with other members of the team sketched in as needed.  There's a theory that this may have been cribbed from the novel Killerbowl but where inspiration (or homage) ends and plagiarism begins is a stormy sea and early 2000 AD often sailed close to the wind.
The first 19 episodes are often titled as "The Southhampton Sharks" in collections (and the first page is entirely missing from the Extreme reprint), but actually the first 5 episodes feature a game against the Wakefield Warrios, the next 4 are a US-set flashback sequence (the Florida Fiends against Tallon's previous team the St. Louis Leopards) and then we get 10 episodes of "The Southampton Sharks" taking us up to prog 202.  After a 15-prog hiatus, we get The Jensens, with art by Steve Dillon: a storyline that continues into the next stage.  Prog 219 challenges readers to come up with their own team designs for later use in the strip.

Dash Decent
This pastiche of old black & white Saturday morning serializations of Flash Gordon provides the last of the triumvirate Bonjo - Klep - Dash.
Apart from a brief 2000 AD Annual appearance, this is it for Dash. The next foray into single-page comedy strips is probably Sooner or Later in '86.

Judge Dredd
As The Judge Child saga ends and Dredd returns to Mega-City One we're left with the dangling thread of Owen Krysler and predictions of future doom, but the most far-reaching effects of the tale have been the introduction of Judge Hershey and The Angel Gang (in particular Mean Machine).  It's not long before another brother is added to the mix in The Fink (193-196).

Otto Sump returns with his Ugly Clinics (186-188), inspiring Who Killed Pug Ugly? (203).  Block War (182) and Pirates of the Black Atlantic (197-200) foreshadow perhaps the most far-reaching and famous of all Dredd epics, but that's for a later stage.  Unamerican Graffiti introduces Marlon 'Chopper' Shakespeare (who we'll meet again, of course) and The Mega-Rackets provides an umbrella for eight shorter stories of organized crime in Mega-City One (some of which, like The Umpty Baggers, had already been introduced in earlier tales).

So, this is a stage that cements the past, harks to the future and builds up Mega-City One as a living, breathing place.  You've got to build it up before you knock it down...
The Mega-Rackets have their final Crime File in the next stage...

Meltdown Man
Charles Bronson in Planet of the Furries. This epic saga marks a record in 2000 AD: a fifty-one prog unbroken run by Massimo Belardinelli. Nick Stone finds himself blasted into a future where animal hybrids (yujees) are a slave race to a human elite.
Continues to its conclusion in the next stage...

Killer Watt
The second stepping stone (after Terror Tube) towards a full series of Nemesis the Warlock, this sees Torquemada chase Nemesis (still unseen within the Blitzspear) through some 'phone lines and get destroyed.  Unfortunately, simple corporeal death can't stop Torquemada's evil spirit.
The influence of Terror Tube and Killer Watt reverberate through this stage, building towards an eventual series (starting in prog 222). As we wait, we get three Star Pin-ups: Torquemada (184), the Blitzspear (187) and the Official Gundola (195), and finally a reveal of Nemesis himself, not in the prog, but in the 1981 Sci-Fi Special (in a 5-page thrill sometimes titled The Sword Sinister).

Tharg the Mighty... More in the next stage...

Ro-Jaws' Robo-Tales
Gary Rice continues to dominate with memorable tales such as The Tidy Up Droid and Miracle in Slum Alley. Alan Moore invents a recurring character in the two-part Final Solution (189-190) featuring Abelard Snazz: a literal four-eyed geek who causes chaos as his hubris outweighs his supposedly vast intellect.
This ends the Robo-Tales and we switch back to Future Shocks, one of which features Abelard Snazz...

Return to Armageddon
Space pirates (yay!) unwittingly release a super-Satan whose fraternal twin hopes to avert galactic armageddon with the help of a one-armed robot, a magic sword and a beatiful woman. Thirty-five progs of barmy space opera beautifully rendered by Jesus Redondo.
One and done.

[one-offs]
These probably belong under a Future Shock banner, but occassionaly a story would just appear as its own thing: in this case we get Last Thought and The English / Phlondrutian Phrasebook.
Yeah, these keep happening...

Tharg's Future Shocks
This season of Shocks starts to bear fruit in the form of Abelard Snazz (swinging in from the Robo-Tales with The Return of the Two-Storey Brain in prog 209), Joe Black (in 204's often incorrectly named Trail and Error and 216's The Man Who Was Too Clever) and one of the characters from prog 213's Slashman, Kowalski and Rat.
All three of these characters (Snazz, Black and the other one that I'm deliberately not naming in a vain attempt to avoid a spoiler from 1981) return in later stages...



The Future Worlds poster is a great example of how barmy and interactive this era was: not for the first or last time Tharg would joyfully instruct us to cut the comic up and paste bits of it to a big sheet of card - which is exactly what I did.  The downside is that in the process you ended up destroying two pages of Meltdown Man and half of a one-off (Last Thought).

The result, though, was an awesome artifact - and given that I only started my regular collection during this phase, a lot of the characters on the poster seemed like an untouchable dream world: it's such a great celebration from 2000 AD of having 200 progs under their belts.

I found a pic of the completed poster at "Everything Comes Back to 2000 AD":



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References:
- The 2000 AD ABC
- Albion British Comics Database Wiki
- Barney
- Nemesis the Warlock: A Potted History
- Touched by the Hand of Tharg
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

Colin YNWA

Its interesting to see how few strips there are in this phase. This will continue for a while I suspect, but maybe not to that degree. Interesting that you've selected the start of Nemesis as the start of the next phase. Defo feel this marks a shift in the Prog. Intrigued to think about how you end that section as the Prog has a certain consistany from here for a while in my head.

Jim_Campbell

Quote from: Colin YNWA on 18 August, 2019, 08:01:02 PM
Intrigued to think about how you end that section as the Prog has a certain consistany from here for a while in my head.

[Insert boringly predictable post about 'resident' strips from me here.]
Stupidly Busy Letterer: Samples. | Blog
Less-Awesome-Artist: Scribbles.

sheridan

Quote from: Funt Solo on 18 August, 2019, 04:00:45 PM
and finally a reveal of Nemesis himself, not in the prog, but in the 1981 Sci-Fi Special (in a 5-page thrill sometimes titled The Sword Sinister).


Yes, I noticed that in my recent read for Eamonn's podcast - though it was Olric's Great Quest when I were a lad.

Funt Solo

QuoteIntrigued to think about how you end that section

It's tricky to phase it because after 178 the next pure jump-on is 335.  The format I've chosen limits me to at most a year of progs in a single stage, and from 222 to 335 there are 113 progs.  Some of them are almost pure jumpers: 245, 260, 308 and 331, but other things have swung my thinking a bit.  I'll leave that as a future surprise.

Staring on 222 is slightly messy (slicing up Meltdown Man and The Mean Arena), but the end of Portrait of a Mutant in 221 leading into the first full book of Nemesis the Warlock is pretty powerful as a hinge.  We segue then into a powerful series of launches: 228 with Rogue Trooper, 232 with Ace Trucking Co. and 236 with Block Mania (just in case anyone needed something to get excited about).

I remember at the time feeling like this was a new era as each new thrill that launched was just so fucking good.
++ A-Z ++  coma ++