Thanks for looking into it!
As far as 2000 AD credits go, at the time Tully had been writing Mean Arena for ages, but no other strips (he may've had some in Battle/Action, Eagle and what have you).
But the credits change from Tom Tully to A. Ridgeway for the last stretch (Progs 251-283). I have an idea that no one was especially enamored of the story at that point, but maybe Tharg had to keep running it because of all those readers who'd won a competition to have their Mean Arena team featured in the strip. So maybe Tully felt he was hacking it out more than usual, and wanted to hide behind some anonymity?
Or maybe the editor at the time had to rewrite the scripts a fair bit to shoehorn in the reader's teams, and so assigned a different script credit.
Aside from my own personal numbers game, this means nothing to anyone and doesn't matter a whit!
As far as 2000 AD credits go, at the time Tully had been writing Mean Arena for ages, but no other strips (he may've had some in Battle/Action, Eagle and what have you).
But the credits change from Tom Tully to A. Ridgeway for the last stretch (Progs 251-283). I have an idea that no one was especially enamored of the story at that point, but maybe Tharg had to keep running it because of all those readers who'd won a competition to have their Mean Arena team featured in the strip. So maybe Tully felt he was hacking it out more than usual, and wanted to hide behind some anonymity?
Or maybe the editor at the time had to rewrite the scripts a fair bit to shoehorn in the reader's teams, and so assigned a different script credit.
Aside from my own personal numbers game, this means nothing to anyone and doesn't matter a whit!