2000 AD Online Forum

Retrospective musings on a wet Friday...Pretty faces and scary thumbs...

Henry Flint can draw whatever he wants, however he wants it, and I'll probably still admire it, but his portrayal in Prog 2303 of Anderson as a high-heeled disco chick sent me back to the prehistoric days and Bolland's Anderson's first appearance – a high-heeled sexy-cool alternative to Dredd's slab-faced action man.
Something I'd forgotten in the donkey's years since I last read this is what a decent horror story it is.
(In respect to recent efforts: Hine's and Percival's Dominion/Deliverance is horrible in the nightmarish way intended, but it's still horrible, and I've got squeamish in my old age.)

The very first Death story was before my time. I didn't come on board until Judge Death Lives, and what impressed hell out of me then was not the spookiness but the carnage. There is, however, that scene where Judge Fear grabs hold of some jovial drunk and gives him an eyeful.* In close-up, Fear's thumbs look like real thumbs, only scarier.
Horse-skull zombies and flamethrower skeletons and the like were great, but it wasn't like I'd have been afraid to run into one in the street.
But those thumbs.
It was easy to imagine a thing with thumbs grabbing you by the face.

The first Judge Death story has something similar. Look at Death's hands. They're long-fingered, long-nailed, sinister-but-believable hands, and they're reaching out to you, and if one of them touches you you're dead.
And then later on we have the thing explaining itself from beyond the grave, with the sibilant esses and the dripping speech bubbles coming from Anderson's perfect face.
I don't know what effect this would have had on me when I was little, but damn me if it's not good horror.
That Mr. Wagner could tell a good story. That Mr. Bolland could draw a fine picture.

So anyway, if anyone wants to turn this into a thread, consider the first appearance of something that has since become an institution, and let 'er rip.**


*You know the one I mean.
https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1476769

**My apologies if this has been done to death in years gone by. If it has, please point me to it so I can while away the weary hours.

Hey, just wanted to say I really enjoyed reading this piece, would love to repsond in kind but coming up with insightful analysis turns out to take a bit of effort - more power to you!

100% agree that that first Judge Death sotry is an amazing bit of horror (even as it also reaches for some big laughs, too)

And so, after that slightest bit of encouragement, here is my first impression of the lead story in Prog 330:

A narrator telling us that this is the beginning of something epic.
A Conan the Barbarian type with a stone axe going toe to toe with a particularly nasty dinosaur.
Shaggy things engaging in human sacrifice on top of a huge dolmen which is a gate to the stars.
Great. A lot of interesting ways this could go.
The thing was though, this was 1983, and I expected nothing less from a new 2000ad story but that it should go in interesting ways. I'd been here more than two years and I'd seen Mega-City One nuked out. I'd seen talking animals with AK-47s. I'd seen naked crusaders battling giant spiders.
And I'd already bailed once on the Galaxy's Greatest when, for a couple of weeks earlier that year, it had just about failed to thrill me as it had before. So the burden was on this Sláine to impress me, and do it fast.

The art was something new, and I have to say I liked it from the get-go. There was a children's storybook feel to it, but with a hard edge, and with blood on that edge.
There was also the title font – proper Celtic swirly stuff. It looked great, but I remember having reservations. This was a British comic and it was trying to be Irish. Were they really serious with that long accent over the A of Sláine, or was it the equivalent of metal bands throwing umlauts around for show? (I'd just done three weeks in an Irish-language college and I was feeling possessive.)* I just hoped they weren't going to get all leprechauny.
Reservations aside, this was a good enough story for my tastes, but what won my heart was the last panel. Sláine and Ukko are sitting in a barge filled with dung.
I'd been here more than two years and I thought I'd seen everything, but I'd never before seen excrement so unapologetically rendered.
What really won me though, was the narration that tells us that our heroes are on their way to the Land of the Young.
Had they called it just that, and left it at just that, I'd have been turned off. You see, Irish mythology, in which I was sort of half-versed, tends to portray the Land of the Young – Tír na nÓg – as a fairyland of diaphanous blondes poncing around on white horses and playing sweet music. Bo-ring.
But Ukko tells us that this Land of the Young is so called 'because few grew to be old'.
It's a long way from the storybooks.
And they're sitting in shit.
The tone was set. I was in.

The story did take us in all sorts of directions in the coming years, and I didn't care for all of them. But as someone has already pointed out on this forum, all that time-travelling, dark-gods stuff was advertised right there on the first page.
And the last page is shit-ridden death foretold, so of course I was going to buy the next prog.


*I had no notion as to how the name really should be pronounced until we all went back to school and the other two tooth readers in the class unhesitatingly said it as it was written – 'slawn-yeh'. That was it then. You can't fight peer pressure. 

Sorry, Alex. I should have started the above by thanking you for your appreciation.
Hard to tell how - or if - our ramblings will be received.

Just to echo Alex, I'm really enjoying these contributions.  I'd totally forgotten why Slaine's Land of the Young was so named - in my schoolbooks Tir Na nOg was a place where you'd stay young forever.

I'm enjoying writing these, and I'm happy to have an outlet for long-held notions, but please note that while I've started this, I'm not laying claim to it. These are just my impressions, and my day was back in the eighties. There are a lot of squaxx, with a lot of views, and there's a great span of years that I wasn't there for. So if anyone wants to look back at the first appearance of one of the pillars of 2000ad, even if I've already had my go at it, then please feel free. I'd be most interested to hear anyone else's view.
But until then...


If I can pinpoint a single reason why I'm still reading comics at my age, then the name of that reason is Kevin O'Neill.
I'd seen his work – I must have seen his work – plenty of times up till this, but 2000ad was a rich comic and there was always a lot to take in. I spent my money on Battle, where the stories were straightforward affairs of goodies versus baddies and the worth of an artist was measured in how faithfully he could render the military hardware. And then (in a dentist's waiting room of all places) I picked up Prog 223. That was the one with the Alien Pit.
Yikes.
Nemesis the Warlock wasn't like anything I'd seen before. I don't suppose it was anything like anyone had seen before.

The humans were the bad guys. They decapitated cute little helpless aliens. In the first episodes the man wielding the axe was Brother Behell, but even a bad guy of his badness was afraid of Torquemada. Here's badness of a whole different order of magnitude. Here's the apex villain who instantly puts Brother Behell – with his hands-on approach to genocide – in his place, which is to say at the bottom of a hellish pit filled with carnivorous monsters.
And we're supposed to root for the monsters – or at least see things their way.

Boys' comics tended to have a clearer-cut morality. It was accentuated by the good guys being good-looking. Heroes were square-jawed and clear-eyed. That's how we could instantly recognise them as heroes. The hero of this story didn't have anything we could term a jaw, square or otherwise, and there was nothing sympathetic about his gaze. What Nemesis had were cloven hoofs and horns. Smoke came out of his nostrils and he could spew flame from his inhuman maw. I didn't instantly spot him as a devil, but when he describes himself as 'the Lord of the Flies, the Death Bringer, the One Who Waits at the edge of your dreams,' it was easy to see the demonic side of him.
And he was our hero.

Pat Mills at the height of his powers was a master of invention, but the draw for me was always Kevin O'Neill. Case in point: Nemesis Book II was a perfectly good story but it wasn't O'Neill, so I could have taken or left it.* O'Neill rendered the grotesque like no one else. He gave us the most alien of aliens. He gave us the Middle Ages of the far future, where everything had an oily sheen and dripped strange fluids. Given how unsettling he made everything look, I could understand the superstition and xenophobia. I could believe those poor Termites shouting, 'Hail Torquemada!'
Why not? Hadn't we been given a close-up of the alternative? Hadn't we seen Nemesis, 'the Evil One', stripped of its armour, hanged from a gallows, and yet still capable of wreaking seriously sinister vengeance? Having seen that, mightn't you rather opt for your own kind? Well, almost.
The butchery, the fanaticism, and the KKK-shaped masks told the readers what side they should be on.
In Torquemada, Mills and O'Neill gave us a devil we knew, but then got us to cheer for the horned and cloven-hoofed devil you wouldn't want to know.

This is what I was reading when I was ten.
And to think that the older generation blamed our moral waywardness on television.


*Why I had anything against Jesus Redondo when I was little, I have no idea. The man was one of the greats, and I hope that today he is reclining on a big pile of money while attractive people bring him nice things to eat.

[Today is a sort-of day off. I have some correcting to do, but I don't wanna.]

Was Orlok ever meant to be something? I mean, something other than the secret agent saboteur who explains Block Mania for us and leads us into the Apocalypse War?
I wouldn't have thought so.
On the off-chance anyone was wondering, I'm the one who wrote those Apocalypse War novellas that came out a few months back, and you can believe me when I say that I went over the original progs like they were holy writ. When the story first ran I just lapped it up and asked no questions, but my more recent scriptural studies made me think about this and that.

The appearance of Orlok is a complete change – not in pace but in scale. Everything is still breakneck action, but whereas last week we had a city-wide war, here it's just one guy.
The shift is accentuated by the change in artists. For four episodes we had masses of Ron Smith's citizens fighting it out in Ron Smith's city.* And then it's Dillon's coarser inks and sparer compositions setting a wholly different tone.**
Where are all the crazy citizens? Not here. What about the war on the street? It's somewhere else. For now it's just this one guy, whose name is Orlok. The strapline on the cover tells us he's an assassin. The caption box in the opening panel tells us he's the one behind the block mania. Questions? Too late. Here come the judges.
A couple of pages later we get the wonderfully terse tough-guy line, 'Got him nothing. I've got six dead judges and one on the critical list.'
There we are. The story has to head towards its conclusion now, and to lead us there we have this slick assassin type with facial scarring and high-tech gadgets and a plan for destroying the world.
Just perfect for any James Bond flick you'd care to dream up.

As a matter of fact, before he'd been given a name and a job description, Orlok's credentials had already been established.
In the previous episode he killed that stool pigeon on camera, just as said stoolie was about to spill the beans to Dredd. All we saw of him then, though, were his hands when he did the killing, and his back as he stalked off.
Interesting thing about the hands that I noticed in my scriptural studies. I'd always thought that the as-yet unnamed killer had – I don't know – knuckled his victim to death or something. We see the big studded gloves on either side of the vic's head and the vic dies. The details weren't important at the time. On close examination, however, I realise that we don't actually see the hands making contact with the head. Maybe it was a printing error. Maybe it was censorship. Maybe I'm just thick. But am I mistaken in believing that there is no garotte where a garotte should be?
Episode 6. Prog 241. Go have a look.
But I digress.

Orlok's appearance refocuses the story. Dredd now has a specific target. He has to find the guy and stop the thing or it all goes kablooie. The war story becomes a chase story. No more sonic cannon, no more stumm gas – just two guys duking it out in the rain.
And then Dredd gets his man, and Orlok tells all.
I was new here, so I didn't even know there was an East-Meg One, but I recognised the hammer and sickle when I saw it and I could quickly take on board the idea of a Soviet Judge.
So Block Mania was a Sov plot. No hints, no clues, not the slightest bit of foreshadowing. It just was. Orlok just told us. Now clear the decks for the Apocalypse War.

And that's the last we see of Orlok for more than five years. He was out of the picture because he didn't matter outside of his narrowly defined role.
I have to say he made an excellent comeback.*** We didn't know that Orlok had been on ice all this time, but it made sense, and it made for a helluva story. Hour of the Wolf ends with Orlok in the wind, free to cook up more nefarious plots against MC1. He was now an established villain, and we could expect multiple reappearances, and those reappearances would give the character dimension and history.
But his original appearance? I presume that the creators just sketched in a useful bad guy. He had a scar and a mission: he didn't need a character.

(...But seriously, what is it with the murder of Citizen Lorien Speck? Ninja knuckle technique or invisible garotte? Firm answers or wild speculation welcome.)


*Ron Smith's Mega-City One was the best Mega-City One.

**Early Steve Dillon was the best Steve Dillon.

***Hour of the Wolf was the best Anderson story.

Red opens her mouth!

This is probably, hands down, my favourite debut of any 2000ad character. Maybe there have been others who've been given better reveals, but I was there for this one, and I didn't see it coming.

My feeling was that Strontium Dog had gone a bit off the boil since Max Bubba had got his comeuppance. It wasn't that I'd tired of the story: it's just that it felt very samey.
So what's new about this one? Well it's called 'Bitch', which is admittedly kind of racy, and acknowledges that the readers aren't kids anymore. But beyond that?
Well, there's a new Stront and – get this – she's a she.
As gimmicks go I'd seen better.

That first episode was nothing we hadn't seen before. Johnny walks into a bar. He's tracking some scumbag. He's taking no guff from anyone. The only variation is that he's being tailed by a sexy dame – all pouty lips and heavy eyelashes like Ezquerra used to draw them.
So there I was reading this wondering, 'Fair enough, but what's her mutation? She's got the SD badge, but what's her damn mutation?'

There's some double-crossing, some gunplay, and some tough talk to prove that this Durham Red is at home in the violent world of sci-fi bounty hunting, but as I say, nothing we hadn't seen before. 
And then Red leads the unfortunate Aberald Rancid out into the street and down an alleyway.

And then she opens her mouth.

Call me simple, but I did not see that one coming.

You're making me want to read all these again and I don't have time!

Reread? You mean this stuff isn't engraved on the inside of your skull?

Quote from: JWare on 25 October, 2022, 10:23:53 AM
The war story becomes a chase story. No more sonic cannon, no more stumm gas – just two guys duking it out in the rain.

Just two guys, he says.  Duking it out in the rain.

That whole sequence is so visceral and immediate.  It's much more powerful than the large-scale stuff; "I shoot you with my gun from over here".  They are no further than arms' length away, in swirling waters, duking it out.  It's like the lens has zoomed in from an overhead view to this direct part of it all.  And absolutely amazingly drawn.  Just perfect.

QuoteAnd absolutely amazingly drawn. Just perfect.

And Bolland's swan song on Dredd, just as the opening episodes had been McMahon's last hurrah.
Block Mania was the end of an era – no two ways about it.
(Now that I think about it, those swirling waters could be all sorts of symbolic...)

Happily, McMahon was lured back to drawing Dredd strips 13 years later in the Megazine!

Tell that to eleven-year-old me.
I'd have laughed at the notion that I'd still be reading comics in 1994.

Muscles – metal and otherwise

I don't think Simon Bisley can qualify as a 2000AD institution. He was more like a visitation from another world – an apparition in the sky that had us gazing upward in fearful awe, wondering what it all portended.
Or perhaps I exaggerate.
I mean, I remember seeing his first go at ABC Warriors and thinking, 'Here's another of Pat Mills's finds. Hmm. Let's see how this one turns out.'
Well, within the next two episodes he turned into Simon Bisley and nothing – and for the benefit of those too young to remember, let me emphasise that I'm not exaggerating now – nothing was quite the same again.

The man came out of nowhere and didn't stop accelerating.
He did four episodes, took a four-week break, and came back even better than before. He was evolving before our eyes, not in years or months as is the usual case with maturing artists, but week on week. And towards the end of that run we watched him disintegrating under pressure, and it was still something to behold. Characters could be reduced to outline sketches and they'd still convey dynamism. In those last rushed episodes there was no suggestion of shoddy work. Instead we were being allowed to see the magic behind the magic.
I don't remember when all the imitators started getting in on the game, but I can see what they were on about. I had pretensions of being able to draw back then, and if I could have imitated Simon Bisley, then damn me if I wouldn't have been imitating Simon Bisley.

For nearly a year after ABC Warriors he just did covers, and not many of them, like some kind of big-shot superstar, and then it was announced that he'd be taking over on Sláine.
I didn't like that. Bisley did robots. He did oiled chrome: not the moors and forests of prehistoric myth.
Bisley on Sláine? No. You must be thinking of Glenn Fabry. Fabry was the guy for hack-and-slay barbarian shenanigans. Fabry – not Bisley.
There was a promo image in the Winter Special, but I missed that one. I only saw the Next Prog teaser that appeared the following spring, showing our hero smashing through a door, veins and eyes bulging. It confirmed my misgivings. You can get cartoony with robots. People – not so much.

And then the following week I took one look at the cover of Prog 626 and radically revised my position.

It turned out that Simon Bisley was the very artist for Sláine: the Horned God.
But you probably knew that.

Quote from: JWare on 25 October, 2022, 10:23:53 AM

(...But seriously, what is it with the murder of Citizen Lorien Speck? Ninja knuckle technique or invisible garotte? Firm answers or wild speculation welcome.)

Well, I never noticed that before.  Surely a touch of the famous white-out brush?  There's no way that couldn't have started life as a garotting scene.

Really enjoying your progstalgia posts, JWare.  Keep them coming!

Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 06 November, 2022, 01:00:17 PM
Really enjoying your progstalgia posts, JWare.  Keep them coming!

My pleasure, JayzusB.
Intensely examining long-ago things of little matter is what I'm all about.

Quote from: JWare on 06 November, 2022, 01:51:47 PM

Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 06 November, 2022, 01:00:17 PM
Really enjoying your progstalgia posts, JWare.  Keep them coming!

My pleasure, JayzusB.
Intensely examining long-ago things of little matter is what I'm all about.

Which is why I love your posts, and Jim Moon's Hypnogoria podcast.

'A hellish setting for numberless tales of heroism and despair'

If I'd known I'd be carrying on to this extent, I'd have given this thread a better name than 'Looking Back'. 'First Impressions' sounds pretty lame too, but it's nearer the mark.

My own first impressions don't come much firstier than Rogue Trooper, who made his debut on the cover of the first prog I ever paid for with my own money. I had to. I'd managed to miss not only the finales of both Meltdown Man and The Gronk Affair, but also Episode 4 of Judge Death Lives when my best mate – my usual supplier – went on holidays or something. Can you imagine spending years knowing the 'Gaze into the fist of Dredd' scene only by hearsay? So yeah, I reached into my own pocket for Prog 228.
So there's Rogue on the cover. Excellent cover, by the way, but not what I was here for. I wanted Nemesis or the Dark Judges. I wanted Nick Stone or Johnny Alpha. I hadn't been asking for any novelties. Not that I was turning my nose up at this Rogue Trooper, mind. Having gone so far as to part with twenty-one Irish pence, I was prepared to give the new thrill the benefit of the doubt.

So what have we got?
Perfect scene-setting in both art and script. Everything is made clear in a few panels. Distant planet: check. Devastated by war: gotcha.
And it's a war-is-hell kind of war. Meet the poor bloody infantry, about to launch their sci-fi version of the Battle of the Somme. These might be the good guys, but they're doomed to die in a pointless fight, victims of their own indifferent high command as much as enemy action.
And here's the enemy. No both-sidesism in this story. They're faceless, jack-booted, nazi-commie types with lightning-bolt insignia, and they've got a death-ray that mercilessly fries the attacking Southers.*
But here comes our hero!
Good character design here. Human but not too human. Uncanny but potentially sympathetic. Rippling muscle combined with hi-tech gear in the finest tradition of science fantasy art.**
Good bit of showing and telling going on too. The reader – even the ten-year-old me – is given everything needed to follow the plot. Our guy is agile, mobile, and hostile. He was bred for war. He's got his biochipped buddies with him, and he's getting stuck into the Norts before the exposition is half over.
The action scene is pure boys' comics stuff, with all sorts of contrivances crammed in to show off this Rogue Trooper's specialised skill set.  He gets the drop on a couple of sentries, shoots one, but then, instead of shooting the other, gets him in a head lock and rips off his gas mask with his bare hands. Then, bred for war or not, he loses his rifle when he falls into the gun pit. The Norts can't take advantage of this and shoot him (because evidently this great big death-ray installation in the middle of a battlefield can't stand up to a little small arms fire) so they go in with futuristic edged weapons (these are fiendish 'vibro-dags' – mechanical daggers fiendishly set to 'vibrate' – the first in a long succession of batshit-wonderful Rogue Trooper weapons designs). So what does Rogue do? The knife strapped to his leg a minute ago has inexplicably disappeared (it'll reappear when things are safe). There's a hatchet on his belt, but this just doesn't feel like hatchet time. So he unslings his pack in an instant and wallops his assailants with it. In future episodes it will be revealed that Bagman's got a department store's worth of lethal stuff stashed inside, but here he is employed just for his sharp corners.
Don't question, just admire.
(Next week we'd see Helm being used in much the same fashion. Bagman had all sorts of things going for him, but Helm? Helm was just good for bopping a Nort backstabber and incidentally showing us that Rogue had an Airborne haircut.)

So anyway, the fight is won, the exposition is rounded up, and our guy strides impassively off into the chem clouds, leaving the survivors and the readers to ponder the question, 'Who was that masked man?'***
The answer would be satisfactorily drip-fed to us in the coming weeks: fine effective story-telling, no doubt about it.

And so this Lone Trooper, the Rogue Ranger, shot straight to second place in the readers' popularity charts and stayed there. For myself, I never quite cared for the character. The setting, on the other hand, was a winner – an unending war in a scorched and poisoned land. I was a reader of Battle at the time, and Rogue's adventures were just a sci-fi take on the repetitive two-fisted WW2 antics I was beginning to get bored with. But Nu-Earth itself? Nu-Earth possessed the monstrous bleakness that only existed in 2000AD. Here was a limitless stage for who knew what kind of god-awfulness. It was the story's greatest strength.
In later years Jaegir would remember this.
Rogue Trooper, unfortunately, would forget.


*Question from 1981. Were they Sowthers or Suthers? My peer group went with Suthers, because the spelling was close to 'southern', but there was no one to lay down the law for us.

**Question from 1986/87. Hands up – how many people here, who on first reading Watchmen, saw a Dave Gibbons-illustrated, blank-eyed, blue-skinned guy with his wedding tackle swinging free, and said to themselves, 'Rogue's taken the bare-chested look a step too far.'?

***Look at Rogue's eyes ringed in black. Now put a red bandanna around that blue neck. Seem familiar yet? There you go. Now it's just a small step to turn Helm into a white stetson, Bagman into an Indian sidekick, and have Gunnar shooting silver bullets.

Excellent review!

Quote from: Richard on 11 November, 2022, 02:30:19 PM
Excellent review!

And only forty-one years out of date!

Great stuff as always.

I always said 'Suther' in my head but I think I made an effort to change it to 'Sow-ther' on Eamonn's podcast when we discussed Cinnabar.  Someone on this board pointed out that a 'souther', pronounced the latter way, is a type of wind.

The scripts of Alan Who?

I was reading Alan Moore before he was Alan Moore.
We didn't have superstar writers in my young day, so Moore – if we even noticed him – was just the guy who gave us some pretty good Future Shocks.
And it wasn't as if they were all uniformly brilliant. Look at, say, 'Return of the Thing' from Prog 265, or 'The Wild Frontier' from Prog 269 (and I didn't have to hunt very long at all before I came up with those two). Cover up Moore's name and see just how much they wow you now.
Yeah, thought so.
The name cut no ice with us back then, and when he was finally given his own series, the name certainly wasn't big enough to appear above the title.

I liked Skizz. but as far as I was concerned what made it great could mostly be filed under 'Things that went over your head'.
I recognised that it was a sort of mash-up of ET and Boys from the Black Stuff, but I'd never seen either, and I think I disapproved of the writer not trying to be more original.
I was a 12-year-old boy so I was hardly going to identify with a 15-year-old girl, and I wasn't living in Thatcher's Britain, so the plight of the unemployed working man wasn't likely to resonate with me.

Reading Skizz now, the scene that really gets me is where Roxy goes to the pub and tries to convince Loz and Cornelius to help spring her alien friend. It's a piece of scriptwriting that wouldn't be out of place on the stage, or in some kitchen-sink television drama. But I didn't go to the theatre or care much for tortured social commentary, so that sort of thing in Skizz was all too mature for me. And that's on Moore, not on me. I was the target audience, dammit.

The story was better when it sped up. My favourite scene there (and probably everyone's) is the apotheosis of Cornelius Cardew, smashing his way out of his wrecked Transit van. I didn't recognise it then, but that pipe wrench rising through the shattered windscreen is the Excalibur of the downtrodden.
'I've got my pride,' indeed.
To me it was just a bloody good action scene, and this writer guy should maybe have given us more stuff like that.
And he was just the writer guy. If I took note of his name it didn't stick long in my mind.

Art was different. After having looked at his art every week for 23 episodes, I could have recognised Jim Baikie's style in the dark, but I don't think I appreciated that writers had styles. That meant that the arrival of Moore's next series the following summer meant little enough to me.
I wasn't paying much attention when Halo Jones first appeared, and what I might have skimmed over in the newsagent's certainly didn't tempt me to jump back in.
Most likely I looked at the art and thought to myself, 'Ian Gibson doing girly stuff again? Wasn't The Amazing Maze Dumoir enough?'

Never going to give you up

You know what I appreciated about 2000AD? It's permanence. Through the early eighties I drifted in and out, but it was always there and I could always come back to the good old prog, its chrome logo greeting me from the same newsagent's shelf.
And then in 1987 it changed. The paper stock changed. The size changed. Before the year was out the very logo would change. And where were the thrills of yore? Where were the artists and writers who'd delighted me in the past? Not that I was planning on forsaking the Galaxy's Greatest just then. Far from it. I had been born again when Halo Jones 3 had appeared the previous year. I was one of the unquestioning faithful now, and if anything, a new flavour to the comic intrigued and excited me. But after the hoopla of the tenth anniversary prog had died down, a slump set in.
I have to confess that much of this was me and not the comic. June of that year got eaten up by  exams, and the dreariness they engendered persisted through the summer. It was just a blah teenage time. Oh yeah – and the music in the charts was shite.
But 2000AD wasn't helping. The good stories fell away, leaving things like the Mean Team sequel behind. The Dredd story Revolution got me all gingered up, but what I expected to be a mini-epic ran for only three episodes.
And then this new thing arrived, written by one of those new writers and drawn by one of the new artists.
Grant Morrison? Did he maybe do a Future Shock or something? Steve Yeowell? Who's he?
Well from now on they'd only need one credential. Yeowell and Morrison were the guys who did Zenith.

After a prologue giving us a bit of dark alternate history followed by an occult Cold War vibe (so far so good), the title role makes his appearance.
SKKRRRAASH! goes the sound effect.
I think the word I'm looking for here is 'immediacy'.
Sure, we'd all seen superheroes before and dramatic entrances were the genre's stock-in-trade, but this was real-world. This was the eighties.*
It happens in an ordinary London flat. That was Yeowell's strength: presenting the utterly ordinary.  You can believe in the flat, and the copy of the Sun, and the teacups, and so you can believe in the man who crashes into it. The character was designed by Brendan McCarthy, and Yeowell doesn't change a thing, but he does make it look like a real person wearing a McCarthy-designed suit. Look at the treads on Zenith's boots. And look at the lad's hair. In 1987 I saw that hair and I recognised it. Didn't I say that the charts were rubbish that summer? Well Stock, Aitken and Waterman had just given us a certain Rick Astley – who had almost the very same hair! How contemporary was that? The Comic of the Future had arrived in the present.
Zenith was a world of breakfast television and Conservative MPs and manufactured pop acts and superhero Nazi dark gods, and we could buy right into it. It was all so Right Now. 2000AD had never done a real superhero story before, but to hell with tradition. Try wit instead. The hip new creators were giving us a superhero – one that made the caped and costumed Americans look laughably stodgy.
Yes, Zenith wears a mask. Yes, he flies. Yes, he makes his entrance with a splash panel. But he's pissed, and not in the American sense.
Here he is, the Tooth's first superhero. Compare his drunken entrance to that of the preposterous Marvel poseurs. Zenith is as big a dickhead as any of them, but Morrison, with that particular brand of up-to-the-minute cleverness that he might as well trademark**, makes it clear that there's no pretending otherwise. And like Yeowell's art, we unhesitatingly accept it. Why? Because Zenith is just like any 19-year-old would be if he had superpowers and a number one single. He's a self-centred tosser.

The golden-age artists and writers might have gone, but 2000AD could still deliver the goods.
And look! – it could even be cool and knowing, just like I wanted to be.
I'd be staying.


(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/55Cqu8VpnPuazMbhPTUBrXXwaa3dBDEfYmY3SfbuftKOvLLedSZbWblYfvPtM5X_jrVkoHZrqdNwuNhh8WMsBR8M7lPcrlF1GNX41potblK0a7Xejeuy42gy4ze8UH4UfWrFgHd6SwqY1NeU3VcK9v2WBe0aBTXjmxXvNC5Gu7ZqHBrAntrI7qyDaGpBCHxF1IsV0u2OJ2gVDtRDVHE5fTOwT8VvgeccevEzDr1s8JBUpRdWRvSgSHOovS1Yk-FJHTSn5HBOsXOYXGhymxjsNhvgzh-D_NWgOakC_Z0EQ3HUD3LminiMYW2i1PuWNax91Aqdhwpw-5KoCx9W7DqqZCdmcLo0o2656nkOrdWyU8X6gQM-w7W3dEQShVZdO661QAtkrrcLiNMbrDywsNzxtnc-mWpoA9EJcenEoDIKyqw_MqPbj7ZF2Bq3AX9h1sIClgnh31TIYRWFNPVtICtc_vUr5-mkGc5eTnSuxLSM10PEsM8mDQugy93WS-uXYKGsmrltb0PgSrk6LM2-r6kU9BjjWRKLCmQMmTaGxl0nuct9f9yPoxRC599djQlw_8HXeo8y8_-AjoIl7-U_X9rLOHSmcZYbp-zH9-BdCv4A8edpX1uy0XsnDiFE-wjZvsL1LWNA7PxAS6ZIQuWuOUUuW1lRF-_pgOyZaAdNhbrnrcllaz96d1UJfHnUCXbG4z8lnmoCzLLeVTjKDkEE-HK5dWJYICOnVWI4zBP8ACwmDCVHvBo3vgm6SPcjRyCu6NwMgVko0d1SqpXBv6hcAPCKdTrGWN5yj5kYONIpYw21BWI6rsesQL8yMN4jySIT28JCSZ-vVrT2UzaJpeOfb8V-AIHlw6wVBS8vIynVcGlB4JZ8E3PeHEXcvu9GBi3HhCXpDD-Hdghl-V47oNeMiMIaxDPTxslENLuERscE52Bai_ZTrjRf=w1077-h934-no?authuser=0)

*Don't tell me what Frank Miller was doing with Daredevil or what have you. I wasn't reading American comics. And besides, all that was in the States – a place that only existed in fiction anyway.

**The young Morrison being so aptly described on this forum recently as 'brilliant but kind of full of shit'.

Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 12 November, 2022, 10:53:53 AM
I always said 'Suther' in my head but I think I made an effort to change it to 'Sow-ther' on Eamonn's podcast when we discussed Cinnabar.  Someone on this board pointed out that a 'souther', pronounced the latter way, is a type of wind.

I still say "Suther" as it seems more correct (like 'Southern' or 'Southerly', shorn of the extra letters), not to mention better - "South-er" is a car crash in the mouth.  It sounds like some of those American pronunciations you hear, where they haven't twigged how to change the emphasis on different syllables as you add to a word.  e.g. "Super-lative" rather than "su-perlative".  And I have no trouble that it's also a type of wind.  The dictionary is full of examples of words with different meanings.

A small bloodstained notebook, found at the scene of a brutal battle...
Prog 494 gave us a promo: Join Them In Prog 500!
A sci-fi Boris Karloff packing heat. A band of assorted oddballs and hard cases.

(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/i/jsware2002/Bad_Company_promo.jpg)

Dunno about this.
It's hard to do a convincing story with an ensemble cast. Was this going to be an oversized A-Team? The ugly one, the crazy one, the one with the catchphrases, and the one with the with the dog brain?
And a war story by Ewins and McCarthy? I liked the overall aesthetic, but I wanted an element of realism in my war stories. I wanted machinery designed by the likes of Cam Kennedy. Instead we've got Kano's rifle with the oddest ammunition feed you ever saw.
And the title? Was that a sort-of pun or was it Bad as in Michael Jackson Bad – a misguided attempt to be 'with it'?
I was pleased when that one was cleared up on the page immediately preceding the grand opening. We had none other than the well-beloved and much-missed DR & Quinch to usher in the new thrill, and if they were there to do the drum roll (or chainsaw in this case) then I would indulge this new thrill and give it my fullest attention.
That said, I gave everything in the prog my fullest attention back then and, sad to say, this Bad Company left the socks still on my feet. I didn't recognise it as Darkie's Mob in space, but I do remember thinking that we'd seen this sort of thing before. And what about that group pose on the last page of the first episode? What was this? A superhero team-up? Everyone getting lost in the general 'Look at me! Look how special I am!'
There was even a guy with a top hat, for chrissake. These characters were trying too hard.

(https://images.rebellion.click/productImage/83/27/00.large.jpg)

I gave it a chance. It kept on getting better. The art turned out to be perfectly suited to the hallucinatory tone of the story.
For me, the whole of Bad Company would be summed up in the cover of Prog 548, with Kano standing there between the corpses and the alien sky all sickly green and migraine purple.
'Once was a bad dream ... Now comes the nightmare!'
Less like a reworking of one of Battle's stalwarts and more like a dose of the DTs.

But that was in the future. For the present, the story was steadily gathering pace before barrelling towards a thunderous climax.
The story's beginning didn't dazzle me. But the conclusion? Let me paraphrase Pete Milligan's script:
How did Bad Company end?
Perfectly.

(http://www.2000ad.org/covers/2000ad/hires/548.jpg)

Great news for all our readers
I've been writing this stuff to avoid writing other stuff, but now I should really knuckle down to the other stuff. No doubt I'll once again find myself musing on progs gone by, and then I'll indulge in another bout of remember whenning, but for the time being that's it.
My 2000AD ran from 1981 to 1993, and I'm all eightied out right now, but if anyone wants to have a go at the nineties, or whatever those decades that came next were called, please knock yourself out.

Thank you for a great thread so far!

Great look back JWare - Kano is on my wish list of figures to create

Quote from: Richard on 28 November, 2022, 10:43:58 PM
Thank you for a great thread so far!

Ditto. Thanks,  J 'best newcomer' Ware, it's been brilliant

What is this sensation deep in my core?
Could it be what humans call... "love"?

Quote from: Trooper McFad on 28 November, 2022, 10:54:10 PM
Kano is on my wish list of figures to create

That is something I definitely want to see.

Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 29 November, 2022, 07:24:33 AM

Quote from: Richard on 28 November, 2022, 10:43:58 PM
Thank you for a great thread so far!

Ditto. Thanks,  J 'best newcomer' Ware, it's been brilliant

Tritto.

Quote from: Richard on 28 November, 2022, 10:43:58 PM
Thank you for a great thread so far!

Thirded! (Fourthed?)

Always a great read.

Final Solution, Late Assessment

I picked this up in the sale, and thought that you all deserved a white-hot, up-to-the-minute review of something that is only thirty-four years old.

Unlike previous posts, this isn't a first impression of anything. In some respects it's a last impression. This is where Strontium Dog, a mainstay of the comic since before I could remember, came to an end.
Oddly enough, I didn't care too much at the time. I was fully engaged with the prog, but I was at the stage where was I appreciating stories rather than being thrilled by them. The truth of it was I hadn't got a kick out of Strontium Dog since we'd first met Durham Red and I hadn't been invested since the hunt for Max Bubba. There was no dramatic tension. Stories went on like they were trying fill a quota. But then, for the first time in ages, something interesting happened. Simon Harrison took over on art duties.
I know that opinions even still are many and loud but in those days, unless the Nerve Centre printed a lot of letters on the subject, the 2000AD forum was just you and your buddy. If you liked it and he didn't, that was as divisive as it got. I liked Harrison's work. It was different, and Strontium Dog had been the same for too long. I used to be more open-minded about art way back when, and there's no denying that what was on show was quality work. But the old-school, stuck-in-the-eighties stick-in-the-mud that I am now looks at Harrison's art and says, 'It's all very nice, I suppose, but it's not Strontium Dog, is it?'
Middle-aged conservatism aside, though, let's just concentrate right now on how very nice it is. Alright, the characters are odd to the point (and often long past it) of being grotesque. Elongated faces, tiny eyes, lumpy musculature. It's hard to tell who's mutie and who's norm here. On the other hand, this is beautifully done. Forms are delineated with the finest of lines and the smudgiest of shadows. Its all brightest and darkest at the same time. I don't know if chiaroscuro is the correct term, or even if I'm allowed to use such a hifalutin word in regard to comics, but damn me if I'm not going to use it. The Harrison fella's got his chiaroscuro sorted, and no mistake.
But on the other hand, it's not Strontium Dog, is it?

Ignoring my usual memory lane schtick, what's the bottom line on The Final Solution?

For:
Some thrilling stuff here. It's action-packed and (for a Strontium Dog script) fast-moving.
The one detail that I remembered from long ago was the New Church's coup. Given the present state of UK politics, I appreciated it even more this time around. The bad guys seizing control of parliament is Die Hard cool and the royal family 'taking the honourable way out' is a hoot.
And bigger-picture, this is a worthy sequel to Portrait Of A Mutant. Stuff is happening. Big stuff. Important stuff. For the first time in a long time, Strontium Dog is on the move.

Against:
Harrison's acid house skater vibe has dated badly. Case in point: the Keeble kids on Smiley's World. I only remembered how they'd been in The Slavers of Drule. Seeing how they're portrayed here, I cringed. I really did. This is where you miss Ezquerra's sci-fi spaghetti western thing.
But the main drawback? It's LONG. Not just Strontium Dog long, but long and broken up. If you count The No-Go Job as part of it, then this is a story that ran for two years. Seriously.

In honour of the staggered and fragmented way the story was presented to us originally, and because my attention span (and yours, I'll warrant) ain't all it might be, I will take a break here and consider the MacNeil finale in a later instalment.

A nice look back JWare. Lying in my sick bed with the dreaded lurgy I might just do a reread

Enjoyed this, thanks JWare!

At the time it ran I hated almost everything about the Final Solution - the art, the story, the bits with the dog - one of my favourite strips had changed in a big way, and it just served to strengthen my feeling that Prog and I were moving apart. That version of me also enjoyed the Harlem Heroes reboot though - at least the first few episodes anyway.

Rereading it now, I have a lot more appreciation for the artwork (although I'm onboard with what you say about the dated 90s aesthetics) but I can't shake the feeling that whilst Harrison evidently got a big kick out of drawing the mutants, his Alpha always feels like an afterthought, vaguely elfin and slightly featureless whilst the more grotesque characters take centre stage in every panel they can.

I'm still not a fan of the story though. It starts off alright, then the stuff with Wulf is just dreadful, then it's all magic and skateboarding goblins and the less said about Feral the better. The fun has been lost by then and for me, the essence of SD has gone with it.

Quote from: Barrington Boots on 19 January, 2023, 02:26:18 PM
It starts off alright, then the stuff with Wulf is just dreadful, then it's all magic and skateboarding goblins and the less said about Feral the better. The fun has been lost by then and for me, the essence of SD has gone with it.

I could have done without the Wulf thing myself. I never did like magic in SD.
Oddly enough, Feral never bothered me. He was just your standard semi-sidekick/hot-headed youth type, and I liked the character design. That white-on-white-on-black was pretty cool as far as the teenaged me was concerned. Didn't like it quite so much, mind, when MacNeil turned him purple.
Didn't like Middenface the Comical Scotsman either. If I'd been Scottish, and Alan Grant hadn't, I just might have taken offence.

Quote from: JWare on 19 January, 2023, 04:31:27 PM
Didn't like Middenface the Comical Scotsman either. If I'd been Scottish, and Alan Grant hadn't, I just might have taken offence.

While I *absolutely never* get irritated by people taking the piss out of the Scots (please don't look at my posting history), there was a lot of lowest common stereotyping going on in the 80s/90s progs and megs.

Calhab Justice was one of the worst offenders. I wrote: "A Scottish Dreddverse tale that struggles to marry well the conspiracy drama of an impending nuclear apocalypse with someone in a tam o' shanter saying 'crivvens'".

Quote from: Funt Solo on 19 January, 2023, 06:37:02 PM
Calhab Justice was one of the worst offenders.

I've just checked your website and I'm astonished how long Calhab Justice went on (and on and on), without me having a clue what it was all about. I think I just saw it as the logical outcome of the aggressive Scottishness that had long been a factor of 2000AD, and then I must have zoned out or something.

1981: First appearance Archibald McNulty.
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/i/jsware2002/Middenface_2.jpg?width=320&height=320&fit=bounds)
1989: Simon Harrison and Alan Grant meet in a bad place.

Final Solution, finally

God, but it took its time.
I was happy to see this story make its return, but I hadn't been holding my breath. As I said before, Strontium Dog wasn't something I was caring about too much at the end of the eighties. When Ezquerra was briefly replaced by some newcomer called Colin MacNeil in mid 1987 I got the impression that the higher-ups weren't really caring anymore either. Sometime after that there were hints that a major character was going to be done away with, but I was too old to be teased with teasers. To be honest, I actually can't remember the forewarnings. I certainly wasn't speculating on who was going to get the axe.
I never reckoned that Ezquerra's withdrawal marked the end of the era. I didn't even mark the finality in The Final Solution. Even when Johnny's wounded face was revealed after his encounter with the Lyran demon beast I don't think I fully worked out that this was the end. But then there was another break, and this one was a long one: too long for suspense to be maintained. It was something like nine months before the story concluded, and that's when the era really ended.

MacNeil the relative newcomer took over from Simon Harrison for this last handful of episodes. 1990 was MacNeil's year. It opened with Song of the Surfer and ended with America. Was it only fitting then that he should be chosen to show us Johnny's last bow—not because he had attained the height of his powers, but because he was one of the new breed?

When Johnny Alpha died he took much of 2000AD with him. In our world it was the summer of 1990, and Strontium Dog was a mainstay of the nineteen-eighties. I'm not saying that he should have died with the decade – far from it. I think that they could have left him alive indefinitely. That, at least, would have made all those subsequent Johnny Alpha stories so much more justifiable. Also, Strontium Dog was a story that just moseyed along. It came, ran for ten or twenty episodes, or however long Wagner and Grant wanted to stretch it, and went on its way again for six months or a year. Sometimes the stories mattered and sometimes they didn't. There was really no reason why they couldn't have just carried on for ever – even without poor old Wulf.
You could argue that Wulf's death marked the beginning of the end, but if that's the case it was an end that took its time in coming. It was two whole years before things began to slide to a conclusion, and even then the conclusion was not inevitable.
But seeing as they'd committed to killing off Johnny, they did it properly. The hero was granted a hero's death. The man who could see everything was blinded, but still stood up one last time, for one last fight. His end was a martyrdom.
The death itself took up a whole episode, and a solid chunk of the episode following, and that was right and proper. Johnny's life flashed before his and our eyes, reminding us what it was we were losing.
And we lost. We most certainly lost. Colin MacNeil showed us everything, from the claws going in to the burnt bones falling to the ground. Johnny Alpha would not be getting up from this one.
For good measure, and in keeping with the scale of it all, Johnny's enemies were utterly vanquished and large elements of his world were destroyed at the moment of his death. Strontium Dog ended most emphatically, and never mind the promises of a follow-up.

This 'new beginning' they advertised was a mixed bag. I for one thought it worked very well in places, but it was all of a piece with the 2000AD of the earlier nineties. Innovations were lacklustre and new writers working on old stories often did little more than remind us why we preferred the old writers.
And we were no longer eleven.
You want me to pinpoint the date 2000AD went into decline? It was when we started having concerns bigger than next prog. It's when we had late-teenage and early adult stuff on our plate – hang-ups and hangovers, bad habits and bad attitudes. It was the summer of 1990: when Necropolis belied its promising beginnings; when Dry Run ran; when Michael Fleisher became a regular writer.
You want an exact moment? It was when Johnny Alpha died.

My understanding was that Carlos did not want to part of  a story where they killed Johnny. I also though that Alan had enough of Strontium Dog and wanted it to end. When Final Solution run I almost created in my mind a blindly dislike to anyone involved in the project. My dislike ran into anything that Simon Harrison did (which looking back was quite unfair). It was so bad that I never could enjoy Revere (which I actually re-read recently and enjoyed it)

I never knew any of the back story and I never had a big problem with The Final Solution. I just dumbly accepted and consumed. Revere, on the other hand, never won me over. The story was impenetrable and I much preferred Harrison's b&w inks to his painted work.
I spent the nineties in directionless ignorance and I cannot explain or defend my tastes, my actions, or any damn thing.

For me the Final Solution in many ways was the beginning of the end for me and few years after that I basically stopped by sub. I rediscovered the prog about 10 years ago and was glad that I could do the whole digital thing otherwise I would not have been able to return to the fold.

Quote from: broodblik on 20 January, 2023, 02:00:08 PM
For me the Final Solution in many ways was the beginning of the end for me and few years after that I basically stopped by sub. I rediscovered the prog about 10 years ago and was glad that I could do the whole digital thing otherwise I would not have been able to return to the fold.

Almost identical story for me as well.

Quote from: JWare on 20 January, 2023, 12:58:08 PM
You want me to pinpoint the date 2000AD went into decline? It was when we started having concerns bigger than next prog. It's when we had late-teenage and early adult stuff on our plate – hang-ups and hangovers, bad habits and bad attitudes. It was the summer of 1990: when Necropolis belied its promising beginnings; when Dry Run ran; when Michael Fleisher became a regular writer.
You want an exact moment? It was when Johnny Alpha died.

This part really resonates for me. I started reading the Prog in mid-80s, subscribed in 1989, but by early 1991, I was done with it for decades.

This is exactly was what killed it for me. Not rubbish like Universal Soldier and Time Flies, but the gradual encroachment of adulthood. Just like I left Whizzer and Chips behind a decade earlier, the Prog didn't fit with the new world I was moving into and didn't have enough nostalgia to be brought along for the ride.

Ironically in 1990 2000ad seemed very edgy and adult to me - Alpha dead, Chopper dead, all those downbeat, soulcrushing Dredd stories than ran around then where he runs down deaf women or letter-writing kids get killed by lunatics. But it wasn't the sort of adulthood I wanted or needed: in retrospect I can see Alpha's death for me was the sad end of something I'd loved and definitely the beginning of the (temporary) end for me as a reader.

Great read JWare, thank you!

Still got a soft spot for Dry Run, mind you.
Even though it's rubbish.

Quote from: broodblik on 20 January, 2023, 02:00:08 PM
For me the Final Solution in many ways was the beginning of the end for me and few years after that I basically stopped by sub. I rediscovered the prog about 10 years ago and was glad that I could do the whole digital thing otherwise I would not have been able to return to the fold.

Quote from: wedgeski on 20 January, 2023, 02:01:37 PM
Almost identical story for me as well.

I'm in good company it seems.

Quote from: JWare on 19 January, 2023, 07:01:33 PM
aggressive Scottishness that had long been a factor of 2000AD,

Hahahahahahhahaahaha

at least he never say Scotchness

Somewhere near Inverness.

(background noise of wind howling and fire crackling)

Aye... Legends do tell that the eggs o' Nessie hirsel' hiv an ooter coating o' breidcrumbs and sausage meat...

There! See?
Aggressive Scots!
You lead a blameless life for years and years, and then you make one little mistake and suddenly they're getting all Scottish on you!

Quote from: broodblik on 20 January, 2023, 02:00:08 PM
For me the Final Solution in many ways was the beginning of the end for me and few years after that I basically stopped by sub.

I'm going to be the dissenting gobshite here and say that I liked The Final Solution a lot, which is a sentence where italics are very, very important.  I liked the new art styles, the introduction of the religio-fascist party, the harsh contrast between British mutie slums and the stark, barren death-dimension, and the sheer bravery of killing one of the prog's most iconic characters.  I didn't like Johnny being resurrected even it was decades later, and have never liked 2000ad's reversal of its old 'dead characters stay dead' editorial policy.

I await your pitchforks and torches.

The story itself was nothing wrong but just the idea of killing of one of my favorite characters was more the problem for me. I also did not like the idea or even the concept on how Johnny was brought back to life. I preferred the stories that just told me  another adventure with Johnny and Wulf.

Weirdly, for me some of the more grown-up stories from the late 80s and early 90s were high points for me.  Song of the Surfer, the increasing politicisation of Dredd and his city, Sláine doing tits, dragons, castration and politics way before Game of Thrones was a glimmer in George's eye, Cinnabar... even the new-look Rogue Trooper seemed like something special before they started the awful follow-up stories.

It was Garth Ennis on Dredd that ruined it for me, to be honest.  As some script droid or other has pointed out, other stories could be mediocre but if the Dredd was good the prog was good, and with Garth Ennis at the reins it simply wasn't.

I fecking love his work these days though, and can't wait for his crack of the Rogue Trooper whip.

Every good thing you name - Cinnabar, rebooted Rogue, tits and all - came before Johnny's death. Summer of '90 was the cut-off. All downhill from there.
I'm not saying Johnny's death kickstarted a decline, but it certainly signified it.

I'd happily rubbish Ennis's early work for its immaturity, but on the other hand, he's only a few months older than I am and I was reading his first published work when I was still in school. I didn't even get a letter printed by Tharg until I was pushing forty.

Quote from: JWare on 22 January, 2023, 06:34:40 PM
Every good thing you name - Cinnabar, rebooted Rogue, tits and all - came before Johnny's death. Summer of '90 was the cut-off. All downhill from there.

Fair enough - to be honest my brother had stopped buying the prog at that point, which meant I had stopped reading it.  Cinnabar, the Horned God, reboot Rogue and Necropolis were all read well after their publishing date in a massive pile of progs donated by one of our scout leaders, so I don't really have a great sense of prog-chronology from back then.  When I started buying my own progs (think Time Flies and Death Aid), things were just about to horribly wrong.

I well remember the sense of unacknowledged dismay that I felt through the winter of 90/91.
2000AD couldn't be bad, therefore it wasn't bad.
Death Aid was funny, wasn't it?
Silo was clever, wasn't it?
The new stories were entertaining, weren't they? Weren't they?
I had never heard the term 'cognitive dissonance '.

I'm a bit younger and didn't come to the prog until the late 90s, and then amassed a huge amount of back issues, and even in my rereads I could tell--when prog 700 hit (October 1990), it was never quite the same. In the previous year we'd had Final Solution, War Machine, Dead Man, Necropolis, Zenith 3 (but also Chronos Carnival, Harlem Heroes and Dry Run, demonstrating that the prog was struggling to commission fresh material). After 700, the quality was severely diluted by the Megazine.

Sadly, prog 700 was pretty much exactly when I started buying my own progs.  Somehow, I kept going - despite all the mediocrity, there was also Firekind, Killing Time and Zenith 4.

I have to admit I liked Silo.  I hadn't seen either The Shining or Die Hard at the time, and thought it was a bit more original than it actually was.  However, I still think it stands up as a good little chunk of psychological horror, something Mark Millar actually did pretty well in the prog (there was some Lovecraft-inspired* Terror Tale by Silo's creators that genuinely sent a chill down my spine, something that rarely happens with me when I read horror comics).

*Or possible Morrison-inspired.

I enjoyed Silo for the same reasons, but once you learn how much is ripped off from Die Hard (and there was also a whole episode of Robo-Hunter lifted straight from The Deer Hunter, but I digress), I think it becomes pretty unforgivable. I still like the art though.

The Megazine was the worst thing ever to happen to the prog. Wagner only wrote Dredd stories for the Megazine for the next four years. I think more highly of Ennis's work in this period than most -- for every bad story there was a good one, e.g. Raider -- and you have to remember he was in his early twenties when he was given the comic's flagship character. The quality really declined after he left and was replaced by Mark Millar, Grant Morrison (who should have been really good but wasn't) and "Sonny Steelgrave".

Quote from: Richard on 23 January, 2023, 04:12:43 PM
The Megazine was the worst thing ever to happen to the prog. Wagner only wrote Dredd stories for the Megazine for the next four years. I think more highly of Ennis's work in this period than most -- for every bad story there was a good one, e.g. Raider -- and you have to remember he was in his early twenties when he was given the comic's flagship character. The quality really declined after he left and was replaced by Mark Millar, Grant Morrison (who should have been really good but wasn't) and "Sonny Steelgrave".

You may have the cart before the horse to an extent, there. A lot of beloved creators appeared almost exclusively in the Megazine during this period because they couldn't get into the prog — Alan McKenzie was writing a chunk of it himself under assorted pseudonyms, for a start, which limited the number of available slots for other writers.

There was certainly a feeling amongst the UK comic freelancers, writers and artists, that if you weren't part of the 'in crowd' then you couldn't even get your 2000AD pitches looked at*. By contrast, David Bishop over at the Meg was a hard man to please, but judged pitches on their merits, so people gravitated towards the Meg.

*Think of how many pages were being taken up in the prog by Michael Fleischer material... who was a personal friend of Richard Burton.

You inspired me to go back and read my reviews of Fleisher-era stuff, because the high concepts are like things any child would do with their toys, but don't come close to any sort of narrative logic.

In the Nu Harlems, we get a psycho-cyborg that doesn't know that trains travel on rails, so starts murdering people. In Nu Rogue Lite, we get:

- the security system on a stolen aircraft kicks in once you've taken off, and then flies you into space.
- Thur5day jumping on and hot-wiring a cruise missile whilst it's in flight.


It didn't make much more sense with White's stuff, though. In Angels, they quickly superglue a wing back onto a downed fighter jet to quickly win the day.

With all the changes I tracked while reviewing it, I calculated that RT(F) became a retcon of a retcon of a retcon of a retcon of a reboot!

Quote from: Funt Solo on 23 January, 2023, 07:09:22 PM
You inspired me to go back and read my reviews of Fleisher-era stuff

These reviews—if there's more than your (thoroughly enjoyable) short pieces on the 2000AD In Stages site, then please direct me to them, that I may read, and be entertained, and relive those days at a safe distance.
The War Machine was the best thing to happen to Rogue Trooper since I don't know when. Hopelessly loyal that I was, it took me a little while to recognise that the follow-ups were all kinds of awful.
I bailed in 1994, having no idea anymore what was supposed to be what.
Let's knife? Let's blow.

The Harlem Heroes reboot could have been good. Really. I'm just not sure how.

I'll defend a lot of the 90/91 period. I enjoyed Silo (the lack of originality never occurred to me at the time), and we also had Hewligan's Haircut, Shamballa, some great post-Necropolis Dredds, Killing Time, and Revere. And, in the Meg, America, Young Death, Beyond Our Kenny, and Al's Baby. So on the whole it was still a pretty fertile time. Crisis and Revolver were interesting too. That period (along with 600s-era material like War Machine, Horned God) had a vibe all its own--2000AD was growing into adolescence, with lots of pretension and surliness, but it still had a lot of passion behind it. But it was all too diluted.

I was recently re-reading some Thill Power Overload in an old Meg and someone (I think it was Steve MacManus) essentially said they went too big, treating it like a mainstream thing when it was in fact still very niche.

It only got really bad when the prog became the domain of Alan McKenzie, Millar, Morrison etc, all frankly taking the piss. I'm sure I've read Millar saying that he'd never really read much old Dredd at the time, and when he eventually did he was surprised that it was really good. Make of that what you will.

Quote from: Richard on 23 January, 2023, 04:12:43 PMand you have to remember he was in his early twenties when he was given the comic's flagship character. The quality really declined after he left and was replaced by Mark Millar, Grant Morrison (who should have been really good but wasn't) and "Sonny Steelgrave".

I appreciate that Garth was a very young man at the time, but I just can't understand why Tharg would give near-exclusive writing rights of the flagship character to an inexperienced writer whose only prog-work to date had been Time Flies.  I wasn't a huge fan of Raider though I'm in a minority.

I didn't mind 'Steelgrave' (McKenzie?) Dredd too much - I thought Dredd sounded a bit more like Dredd than the Ennis version.  Mark Millar was just dire.  Inferno I kind of liked at the time, but looking back now, it really doesn't hold up.

Quote from: JWare on 23 January, 2023, 07:45:13 PM
The Harlem Heroes reboot could have been good. Really. I'm just not sure how.

I remember being really enthused about the first few episodes of Harlem Heroes reboot. I think it's the art, which is all shadows and hyper-violent exit wounds, because on a reread the story starts off fairly weak and gets steadily worse. Everybody in the story is horrible and by the time the cyborg dude is introduced the plot is nonsense.

Looking over Progs from this era it's mad how good things were in 1989 (Zenith phase 3, Horned God, Cinnabar, Dead Man, War Machine) - then you get stuff like Bradley and Dry Run and then by 1991 you've got Junker, Bix Barton & Millar Robo-Hunter...

Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 24 January, 2023, 07:08:47 AM
I appreciate that Garth was a very young man at the time, but I just can't understand why Tharg would give near-exclusive writing rights of the flagship character to an inexperienced writer whose only prog-work to date had been Time Flies.

Ennis was the breakout find of Crisis, and was very clearly a rising star. I have some vague recollection that John Wagner wanted to step back from the grind of the weekly and suggested Garth as his successor.

I mean, Garth says himself that he was too young and inexperienced to carry Dredd week in and week out, but as an upcoming writer in the early stages of your career, if John Wagner puts you forward for 2000AD's flagship strip...? Who's going to say "Nah, I'm all right, thanks" to that?

Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 22 January, 2023, 06:17:36 PM
Weirdly, for me some of the more grown-up stories from the late 80s and early 90s were high points for me.  Song of the Surfer, the increasing politicisation of Dredd and his city, Sláine doing tits, dragons, castration and politics way before Game of Thrones was a glimmer in George's eye

You say that, but GRRM started writing ASoIaF in the summer of 1991...

Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 22 January, 2023, 05:01:20 PM

Quote from: broodblik on 20 January, 2023, 02:00:08 PM
For me the Final Solution in many ways was the beginning of the end for me and few years after that I basically stopped by sub.

I'm going to be the dissenting gobshite here and say that I liked The Final Solution a lot, which is a sentence where italics are very, very important.  I liked the new art styles, the introduction of the religio-fascist party, the harsh contrast between British mutie slums and the stark, barren death-dimension, and the sheer bravery of killing one of the prog's most iconic characters.  I didn't like Johnny being resurrected even it was decades later, and have never liked 2000ad's reversal of its old 'dead characters stay dead' editorial policy.

I await your pitchforks and torches.

I think I'd agree to pretty much all of that.  I like some (most) of the 21st century Wagner/Ezquerra Stont stories, but not the journey to get there (the whole resurrection bit - particularly the way that Feral was disposed of).

I can't imagine any other time when the writing of 2000 AD's most important character suddenly became virtually the sole preserve of a writer with only one previous credit in the comic

Oh...

Quote from: norton canes on 24 January, 2023, 12:55:04 PM
I can't imagine any other time when the writing of 2000 AD's most important character suddenly became virtually the sole preserve of a writer with only one previous credit in the comic

Oh...

Wagner?  or Niemand?

Quote from: Tu-plang on 24 January, 2023, 02:40:08 AM
I'll defend a lot of the 90/91 period. I enjoyed Silo (the lack of originality never occurred to me at the time), and we also had Hewligan's Haircut, Shamballa, some great post-Necropolis Dredds, Killing Time, and Revere.

All of those benefit from some amazing artwork.  Harrison's work on Revere was hard work but suited to the strip.  Hewligan is one of those few comic (as in humorous) strips that actually works.  When you compare it with Straitjacket Fits you can see this in spades.

Quote from: Tu-plang on 24 January, 2023, 02:40:08 AM
I'm sure I've read Millar saying that he'd never really read much old Dredd at the time, and when he eventually did he was surprised that it was really good. Make of that what you will.

I have a passing recollection of Millar being on record somewhere as always being more interested in the American superhero market with Tooth simply being a stepping stone.  It certainly comes across in his attitude towards the characters he worked with.

That said, I find even with his American work there is still a somewhat puerile quality to his work.  Some of the moments and dialogue in Ultimates for instance ... Personally I would peg him as a highly over-rated writer who is nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is.

Clever enough to get several of his titles adapted as movie franchises</cynic>

Quote from: Tjm86 on 25 January, 2023, 08:52:11 AM
Personally I would peg him as a highly over-rated writer who is nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is.

I don't think he thinks he's a particularly clever writer, he thinks he is (and actually is) a very canny businessman — I think he views his books as product and constructs them with great care (albeit cynically and with very little 'art'*) to hit his target market, both within the comic medium and as adaptable IP for film and TV.

He's very, very good at it, but I find the majority of his work soulless for that very reason.

(Worth noting, for all that sounds like —OK, is— criticism, I think it should also be noted that MM has a reputation for being one of the most equitable writers in the industry when it comes to sharing the proceeds of what is basically a one-man IP farm with his co-creators.)

*By which I mean, his writing is workmanlike, but feels like a careful arrangement of story beats, without any real flashes of inspiration. The art is usually great, because he understands the value of paying top dollar to get really good artists, and how to get the best out of them. (Paying well, basically.)

I've been watching with quiet awe the way this thread has grown in the past week.
For a couple of months I posted idle retrospectives about things from the eighties, and I'd get a few comments along the lines of, 'Aw – the old days. They were nice, weren't they?'
But I cross over into the nineties and it's chum in the water.

JWare the 90s was when the prog world really got turned on its head. We all here agree the 80s was golden and it is always more interesting to talk in retrospect why things went haywire :)

Hang on... I stopped reading 2000 AD at prog 670, March 1990 (before returning to the fold in 2017). I know it was prog 670 because that's the last prog in the last box in the loft. The wiki says The Final Solution concluded in progs 682-687, but I can definitely remember Johnny Alpha's death. Was there a protracted epilogue, or are there more progs somewhere in the loft that have lain undiscovered all this time..?

Have you checked what the wiki has to say about your loft?

I'm glad I stayed, but looking at some of those 1990s line-ups, I do wonder how I managed it through that decade.  There was usually at least some good art in each prog, and maybe one well-written story, but it got pretty threadbare at points...  Editorial didn't help when they dismissed one letter writers musings with a reply along the lines of "it's only comics, don't overthink it" (can't remember the exact details, but I remember the day I read it, thinking this was the comic which had published Halo Jones, fallen so low now).

Quote from: norton canes on 25 January, 2023, 11:57:02 AM
Hang on... I stopped reading 2000 AD at prog 670, March 1990 (before returning to the fold in 2017). I know it was prog 670 because that's the last prog in the last box in the loft. The wiki says The Final Solution concluded in progs 682-687, but I can definitely remember Johnny Alpha's death. Was there a protracted epilogue, or are there more progs somewhere in the loft that have lain undiscovered all this time..?

Final Solution Part 1 600-606, 615-621, 636-641 and 645-647 (art by Simon Harrison)
Final Solution - Replay 682 (art by Colin MacNeil)
Final Solution Part 2 683-687 (art by Colin MacNeil) - Johnny is killed @ the end of part 27

Weird. Either I chucked a few progs out (I know!), or some Mandela effect thing is going on

The Harrison portion of Final Solution ended with Alpha's eyes being burned out and him lying on the ground in a fairly dead-ish pose - maybe that's the imagery you now associate with his actual, later, death?

I'm another that loved FS, up until the Colin Macneil portion. Partly because I didn't like his style at the time as much as Harrisons's, but mostly because the story before then had been quirte a lot about Sagan's take-over of the UK government, which was sort of ignored at the ednign, like Alan Grant had got bored - Alpha destroys the dimension portal, McNulty and crew kind of defeat the bad guys, but there's not really a satisfying 'and then another government took over and they were a bit less horrible to mutants' moment. I remember really hoping that 'Strontium Dogs' would explain a bit more about what Britain was like in that new regime but not to be.

Closest we came to that was decades later when Wagner tackled 'The Life and Death' storyline - in which I HATED the Feral bashing storyline but rather enjoyed the evil government mutant sterilisation storyline.

Nobody's Making Me A Nobody Again

Here's an easy one.
What was your first impression of Marlon Shakespeare? I mean what did you see in him right back in his first appearance, when he was just a feather-haired juvenile delinquent?
Antisocial haircut. Pierced ears and nose. Military insignia on his jacket. Spots, even! All of it shorthand for one of those kids with no damn respect.

We didn't have juvenile delinquents in my neighbourhood, so we thought that young Chopper was pretty cool. Sure, there were bullies and bootboys who'd break things and maybe hop on you if you strayed into their path, but they were a far cry from the juvies involved in MC1's scrawl wars. Those characters had style. Chopper – even if you wouldn't be caught dead with that hair – was a contender for King Scrawler, and therefore the coolest of them all.

We'd had plenty of Dredd stories in which the perp was the focus, but it was rarely someone you'd root for. Chopper wasn't some disturbed loser like the guy who spiked the drink of The Man Who Drank The Blood Of Satanus. Chopper was someone we could easily relate to. He was a bored kid who wanted to do something special and be someone special.
And he did it, and he did it in style.
Sure, he got busted, but he made his mark. His tag on the Statue of Judgement was the most poetic vindication of a character I think I'd ever seen – a perfect expression of vandalism as a legitimate rebellion against authority.

I was barely paying attention to 2000AD at the time, but Chopper's magnificent defiance stuck in my memory. You bet I recognised him when he came back.
His comeback was a classic underdog sports story with the emotional stakes of all the Rocky movies put together, but faster. Much faster.
Wagner, Grant and Kennedy invented a sport out of nothing and made us fans. In episode one we'd never seen a sky surfboard before. By episode four we were so invested in the sport that we weren't just cheering: we were practically laying bets.
And out of all those contestants – the bravest fools on earth – Chopper was the guy we were cheering for.

In Unamerican Graffiti Chopper was the protagonist. In Midnight Surfer he was the hero.
His spots had cleared up. His hair was better. The stakes were higher.
Not paint this time, but speed and glory, life and death.

The two stories end the same way: with Chopper on his way to the cubes, and a fist raised to show that they hadn't beaten him. The difference was that the first time it was Chopper's fist on its own. The second time? It was the whole city acclaiming the King Surfer.
It was everyone's fist – yours and mine included.

Been a while since your last look back. At the time he appeared in the prog I wasn't reading it regularly so I don't have the nostalgia of reading it in my youth. However reading Chooper later in life didn't diminish the tale for me - still enjoy it so much so he's on my "figures to do" list
Anyway as always another great look back. 👍🏻

Enjoyable as ever JWare.

Honestly, my first encounter with Chopper (in a Best of... monthly) I was not so taken with the man (boy) himself. I was more excited by the lunacy of his parents and their specific, niche hobbies, the idea that 'unemployment' was a major school subject, and the secret identity of the Phantom. Love a story about a rogue robot with human personality foibles, me (see also Phantom of the Shoppera - a cousin, perhaps?).

But after reading Oz, then finding Midnight Surfer in back progs, you can bet I went back and re-considered 'Unamerican Graffiti' from Chopper's point of view, and you're so right about how triumphant his rebellious attitude is.

Lovely write-up as always,J-Ware. I have very foggy memories of Un-American Graffiti, but Supersurf 7 I remember very clearly - it was brilliant.  The awful balls-first collision with the spiky pole still makes me wince.

And John Wagner is still writing great skysurf stories today.

I'm not old enough to have caught Unamerican Graffiti first time around so was introduced during The Midnight Surfer, in my first year or so as a squaxx.  Concievably I may have seen the name mentioned in a quiz in an annual or special, but it was all new to me.  I was an instant fan of skysurfing and Chopper :-)

(http://www.2000ad.org/covers/2000ad/hires/160.jpg)

The Judge Child's Children

There they are. That's the first anyone saw of them.
It wasn't the first I saw of them, mind. By the time I came upon this prog, maybe a year late, I knew what I was looking at. The Judge Child had been a little bit legendary. Older boys spoke of a story that had run for twenty-six weeks, if you could believe it. The aftershocks would be felt for years to come. The characters – even those that didn't make it out alive the first time – would be seen again.
You don't run a story for six months and neglect to do spin-offs.

There's a lot going on in The Judge Child, and the Angels are only a small part of it. That's the surprising thing – how little we see of them.
They get their big entrance (but not until Part 5); they get their death scenes; and in between they are barely visible amid all the weirdness that John Wagner was pulling out of his big bag of weird. It's as if he was saving up all these odd ideas for ages and finally, rather than letting them go to waste, he just shook them all out into a Judge Dredd space opera.
The Judge Child is no epic: it's a collection of episodes. They may be fun, but they only drive the plot forward (if at all) in contrived ways. Just look at how many episodes are linked solely by the quest for oracle spice which is, you have to admit, a fairly unconvincing plot device.

Owen Krysler, the child himself, is one of the less interesting ingredients in this mix. He starts off as a psychic McGuffin and evolves into a nasty little kid. That's pretty much it.
He comes back as a nastier little kid attempting to twist destiny in Destiny's Angels and then is mutated into the Mutant for City of the Damned, and I put it to you that neither story was the best.
In Destiny's Angels we have the dead raised with something out of a bottle. I'll wager that bottle came out of the same cupboard as oracle spice – a cupboard marked 'Lazy Storytelling'.
And City of the Damned? Famously, the writers themselves gave up on that one.
Don't get me wrong: I hugely enjoyed these stories at the time. The Judge Child itself might have been an overlong mish-mash, but you won't hear me say a word against it.
I mean, hungry planets and Neanderthal folk songs aside, it gave us The Fink.

It was The Fink that introduced me to these sci-fi hillbillies; The Fink that was the first Dredd story I read where I had an idea what was happening. It has a special place in my heart.
First impression? Violence. Icky violence. Real gooshy pull-out-all-the-stops bodily harm.
A man is eaten alive by sewer rats. Lethal spiked balls shoot out of nowhere and catch people in the neck. A heavy-duty poison is poured into a hotel swimming pool just to create a diversion. A paralysed women is dumped alive onto a conveyor belt where corpses are processed. Eyes and teeth will be popped right out. Slicers'll slice, suckers'll suck, crushers'll crush, and acid'll disolve what's left into a chemical sludge.
This was the story that hooked me.
And somewhere in the course of it all we meet the family – the most vicious, orneriest, baddest family the world's ever seen. Dang tootin.
Elmer 'Pa' Angel writes 'Gone to Hell' on his wife's grave marker, chains young Link up in the yard, congratulates his boys on their murderous instincts and, most memorably, has Mean turned into a real Angel.
Mean, of course, was the unlikely survivor of all of this. Killed by head-butting a petrol pump, brought back to life in implausible fashion, and making comedy reappearances for ever after – each time dumber and maddern' a horned toad.
And to think he could have been left a-mouldering on Xanadu under a stone saying, 'Rot His Soul'.

And there's one other secondary character who might have been left where we found her if not for the vengeful inclinations of the fifth Angel. In The Judge Child she's just 'the girl' who accompanies Dredd when the plot requires it. A bit more than a pretty face, perhaps, but not anyone memorable either. But Hershey comes back, hard-faced under McMahon's pen, and showing no more weakness than her mentor Dredd might.
Longer even than Mean would be butting, Hershey would be reminding us of what Fink first noted:
These Mega-City Judge wummen is tough.

To sum up then.
Owen Krysler? Hardly missed.*
All those associated with the hunt for the boy Krysler? More, please.

(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qX32XOYr5rM/U5Gqx-itwrI/AAAAAAAAJws/yR1E_tkrsVY/s1600/fink.jpg)



*The year 2120 was sufficiently far in the future for Krysler's fate to make no difference to us. I mean c'mon – that would by 1998 in real time.

Link always reminds me of Steve Jones on top of a boat in Brazil.

(https://i.imgur.com/EAFyA6O.jpg)

Lovely write-up as always, JWare.  I hesitate to bring it up, but the rest of the Angels were indeed brought back, in a way that made Mean's potion-based resurrection look positively Shakespearian.

Last time I saw another hat like Link's in the prog was on the head of one of Big Dave's drinking mates. Ducky from one of Mark Millar's Robohunters wore one too though - I don't think the look had gay connotations when Link rocked it, but could be wrong.

Glad you liked it, JayzusB. I stalled on the other stuff I should have been writing so I wrote this. Then I stalled on this. My dull-wittedness will be the death of me yet.

The resurrection of the other Angels happened during my wilderness years so I'm happy to say that it doesn't count.
(If you shut your eyes tight, stick your fingers in your ears, and go, "Nah-nah-nah-nah," then you can manipulate reality itself.)

I totally take your point that Kryselr himself does not have a huge amount going on as a character...

and yet, it's his reveal as evil that makes the Judge Child one of my favourite epics, and in fact his basic character design is still an all-timer for me, both as the baldie kid with the Justice birthmark, and as the many-armed, no-eyed Mutant.

I can't imagine there's a good way to do it, and too much time has passed, but I'd be curious to see a story about how Owen Krysler, no matter how wicked he may be, might actually have saved MC1 from some future disaster (Chaos Day? Maybe he'd've known to attack that Sov virus lab before it really got going with its research??). So Dredd was right that his own judgement has to count for something, but also perhaps he can be wrong, too?

Quote from: AlexF on 12 April, 2023, 03:32:41 PMI can't imagine there's a good way to do it, and too much time has passed ...

Interesting, but not something I'd go for.
I knew the ending long before I read the story and so I never considered any other way of doing it.
I still think it's one of the best endings. Owen Krysler goes from being the creepy psychic killer with a weird birthmark to being just a child. There he is, lost and alone and clinging to the bars of his new cage.
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/i/jsware2002/Judge_Child.jpg?width=320&height=320&fit=bounds)
The message? Dredd is a tough bastard, and if you fail to meet his standards, then good luck to you. A perfect encapsulation of the character.
No way a man like that was going to hesitate when it came to pushing the button on East Meg One.

City of the Damned you can keep, with the exception of some other magnificent tough-bastard bits such as:
For you are a Judge. And it is your Duty.

and:
"But you can't change the future! It's impossible!"
"Yeah? Show me the rulebook."

Any other possibilities for Owen Krysler/the Mutant never occurred to me. I wouldn't have it any other way than how it played out.
(Poor old Feyy. 88.8% accurate just wasn't enough.)

Quote from: AlexF on 12 April, 2023, 03:32:41 PM...I'd be curious to see a story about how Owen Krysler, no matter how wicked he may be, might actually have saved MC1 from some future disaster...

Ooh, juicy idea. A divergent timeline where everything goes Justice Department's way... Dredd Planet!

Pointless Pitch #30759 - Dredd Planet Alpha

Imagine...

Owen Krysler is taken in by the Justice Department as an infant and rises to become the most beloved Chief Judge in history, spreading the jurisdiction of the Mega City One Justice Department across the entire planet and significant portions of the wider Solar System. An Empire of Justice built on conquest. Judges control everything - the most legendary of them - the Dredd Brothers.

But can even they bring Justice Department jurisdiction to the first alien world encountered by humans? They have the firepower, they have the judges, they have the Law on their side, but do they have the grit? This would be their Prog 1* story. (*Perfect world, remember? Judge Dredds is in that Prog from the start.)

And what if one or both of them fell through a wormhole doing something selfless and heroic (relatively speaking) only to end up in our Mega City One? Nah. Standard catch & detain fare. Fisticuffs and cube time, at best. Bringing them here feels like the most pedestrian route...

So what if our Judge Dredd fell into their perfect Mega City One - seat of an intersolar jurisdiction of largely peaceful, largely pacified citizenry? Hunted, captured, and deputised by the Dredd Brothers through the course of their adventures over a year?


"Dredd Planet" because it sounds cool and is what the story is about - Joe and Rico Dredd's first major achievement of their careers, leading the first invasion of an alien planet, and their continued dominance as major forces loyal to the Department. "Alpha" because this is the Alpha Timeline, the core timeline around which all the other local Justice Department timelines coil and twist, the Ideal that pulls all the others away from the edge of the rope and eventual chaotic fraying into nothing. The closer a timeline can get to the Alpha, the stronger it becomes. Further away they become weaker and more chaotic. Our Dreddverse is in there somewhere - but which way is it going? What would the Justice Department do if it learned of this situation? How could it be exploited? Mitigated? Appropriated?

So all the Alpha timeline invasion stuff is in the past - amongst other things, maybe the equivalent of a Robot Rebellion or Apocalypse War - and we get to contemporary times in the Alpha timeline, where just about everything goes Justice Department's way, and rarely at high cost. Joe and Rico are still top judges, involved in normal policing, detective work, conquering new jurisdictions across the local galaxy, tracking down dissidents and terrorists, protecting the borders of the Justice Department's jurisdiction - all the fun stuff. Our Judge Dredd arrives by accident - triggering a year-long mystery arc in the Prog and Meg (challenging!) in which Dredd is missing, presumed dead (which should run first, with Dredd Planet Alpha coming next as a kind of explanation). Dredd is stranded in the Alpha timeline for a year, where he learns many things, including the importance of the Alpha timeline itself (which is very strong and therefore very hard to get into or out of). This story should concentrate on the Dredd Brothers and their world, leaving Our Dredd very much a minor character; utterly outclassed - at least to begin with. He has to earn his way into the Dredd Brothers' story - which is hard, because they're kinda' awesome. Even to Our Joe. In this timeline, Justice Department does things perfectly. Joe is, slowly, impressed and inspired.

When he finally gets back - what if Dredd became a prophet? Still Dredd, still on the front lines, but with a new zeal - a new vision for how things must be. Gandhi with a Lawgiver, Moses with a daystick...

So, shape-wise, you'd have the resumption of normal Dredd stories after his disappearance is explained starting at the same time as Dredd Planet Alpha, leading to the possibility of the one supporting or informing on the other, intertwined like the timelines. Say, Dredd being lenient in a brutal way after seeing and understanding how and why the Alphan judges do it; leading by examples set in the Alpha and inspiring the judges and citizens around him but indifferent to their growing respect and, soon, loyalty. What will he do with that loyalty, that willing following sharing his vision of How Things Must Be Done?

*dhum-dhum--dubba-dubba-dum*

Yeah, I'd read that...

What...? Oh, bugger.

Sit down.
Deep breaths.
Damp cloth on forehead.
Feel better?

Heh. Sorry. I haven't had a toke in a while and it's kinda' hit me right in the creatives.

I'm sure I'll regret it all in the morning...




where's Chip...?

That's OK.
Just remember that this is 2000ad: not Marvel in the seventies.

(https://i.imgur.com/cWTekIT.jpg)

An Impossible Journey

The Cursed Earth was like the first Star Wars film. None of us had seen it but we all knew about it. The difference was that a novelisation of Star Wars was floating around, whereas The Cursed Earth was known only by fragmentary hearsay. I knew and cared nothing for the Robot War or Luna 1, but I was aware that The Cursed Earth (pronounced 'curséd' by the elders) was the seminal foundational epic.
As I settled into reading 2000AD, the early Titan reprints started being advertised in the prog. As far as I was concerned these things were unobtainable, and the grainy black and white ads only enhanced the legendary status of the original epics. And then a few years later, when I was able to afford them, a local bookshop started selling the Titan books. I joyfully acquired (among many others) the two volumes of The Cursed Earth (somewhat abridged). I still have them.
This was during my born-again-squaxx phase, so it was perfect.
I saw that the elders weren't wrong. This was the primordial heroic Dredd from the age of legends.
Reading this story was like a believer stumbling across the Old Testament for the first time. The stories strike a different tone, the message isn't quite the same, but this is where everything we hold sacred took shape.

The Cursed Earth is McMahon's show. If you're not a fan of McMahon, then tough.
I was a fan – very, very much a fan.
I won't talk about Mills's wonderful histrionic script or Bolland taking another step along the road to perfection. The Cursed Earth is McMahon on overdrive, turning out episode after gaudy episode of egregious nonsense and stone-cold thrills.
And for the second of those delicious Titan books he provided new art, and for me that art – the cover and flyleaf – was what Dredd was all about.
The cover shows our guy calmly reloading, undaunted by an onrushing pack of tyrannosaurs. Go, Joe!
But this was the image that summed it up for me.

(https://i.imgur.com/gfq8Dp5.jpg)

That's my Dredd: the unstoppable force in the Mojave Desert.
The actual episode, with Dredd stumbling and hallucinating, is all well and good, but that to me is early Dredd, and Mills's Dredd. The Dredd who stepped aboard the land raider and headed west had worn a cape on Luna 1. He had a landlady called Maria and a robo-servant called Walter. All of that had largely gone by the board by the time I'd got into 2000AD.
My Dredd is the stripped-down Dredd in that picture, walking the last miles of his ordeal. No drama. None of your, 'This Cursed Earth will not break me!'
Nope. This is McMahon without Mills. This Dredd merely wipes away the sweat as he keeps on going, head down under that huge sun – the hardest son-of-a-bitch as ever wore a badge.

If this is the Old Testament, then here, in the crossing of the wilderness, the Law was handed down.

Quote from: JohnWare on 13 June, 2023, 02:06:49 PMAn Impossible Journey

The Cursed Earth was like the first Star Wars film...

I've not seen that artwork before. It's awesome. Thanks for sharing JW!

Quote from: Le Fink on 13 June, 2023, 02:58:27 PM

Quote from: JohnWare on 13 June, 2023, 02:06:49 PMAn Impossible Journey


The Cursed Earth was like the first Star Wars film...

I've not seen that artwork before. It's awesome. Thanks for sharing JW!

It really is.  McMahpn at his very best.  And lovely write-up as always, John.  That was absolutely my experience of the Cursed Earth too - knowing it through legend rather than actually reading it (I got round to that eventually too, of course).

Another great look back. Thoroughly enjoyable recap

Good show, JW.

I think The Cursed Earth was probably the story that made me a proper Dredd fan, before that he was just another character to me.

Satanus has a distant and lesser known Radback relative.
His name is Mister Grumpy (as per the Mr. Men children's books naming convention).
While he disapproves of the treatment of his Meg-side cousin by Dredd and the denizens of the Cursed Earth in the saga, he does approve of this review.
The bloke that provides his shelter, food and water appreciates JW's 'timely' reviews in general.
With a similar story of regular Prog purchases around the 200's, so it was Titan Books and Eagle re-prints for the then unobtainable early Prog's, containing the best of Dredd's earliest.
(https://i.postimg.cc/XNcSH5C5/IMG-20230614-071003.jpg) (https://postimg.cc/vDBNDcX8)

Y'see, this is why I'm never visiting the Radback.
Mr. Grumpy I could maybe deal with, but not if he shares a habitat with Mr. Too-Many-Fucking-Legs-For-Comfort, Mr. Bite-You-As-Soon-As-Look-At-You, and Mr. Sting-You-And-Leave-You-To-Die-Under-The-Unforgiving-Sun.

Tell me, Linc – does Mr. Grumpy ever get delusions of grandeur and climb up on church roofs looking for law enforcement officers to eat?

Quote from: JohnWare on 14 June, 2023, 09:01:35 AMdoes Mr. Grumpy ever get delusions of grandeur and climb up on church roofs looking for law enforcement officers to eat?

I'm not sure if skinks dream like humans and some other creatures do.
Although I'd swear he's dreaming of Dredd's first encounter with the 'Son of Old One Eye' just now.
(https://i.postimg.cc/3JKd0Xfv/Satanus-CE.jpg) (https://postimages.org/)
(https://i.postimg.cc/9XPDf8b2/Grumpy-asleep.jpg) (https://postimg.cc/hhjDy0NZ)

Such gore! Such ultra-violence and published not that long after the castration and then slow death of a neutered ACTION weekly.
How did Tharg and 2000AD get away with it at the time.

Quote from: lincnash on 15 June, 2023, 02:04:41 AMSuch gore! Such ultra-violence ...
How did Tharg and 2000AD get away with it at the time?

And look how they skirted the edge of blasphemy by putting the crucifix in the middle, with blood dripping down from the devil beast's maw onto the crucified Christ.
Wow.
I was a well-brought-up Catholic boy and, trust me, we were taught not to take such imagery lightly.
Kids these days, etc. etc.

Quote from: JohnWare on 15 June, 2023, 07:52:05 AMAnd look how they skirted the edge of blasphemy by putting the crucifix in the middle, with blood dripping down from the devil beast's maw onto the crucified Christ.

Remind me, who wrote that again?  ;)

First of The First Impressions

And this is the big one: the man himself.
What was my first impression of Dredd? Very hard to say. I was so young that most of my impressions were first impressions.
I know I was seven when I first held a prog in my hands, and it was Prog 79, and that meant McMahon. How does a small child react to Mike McMahon's Dredd when the comics he's been used to thus far have largely featured anthropomorphic animals dressed in 1950s clothing? Those comics had stories that at their most adventurous might feature a small sailing boat and would usually end with a slap-up tea. What did Judge Dredd offer? I really couldn't tell.
Seriously – I was barely literate in the first place, and I was supposed to make sense of Chapter 19 of The Cursed Earth? Come on.
But an awareness of a rather ugly, rangy figure with a helmet and a big motorbike did seep into my consciousness over the next couple of years. I couldn't have made head nor tail of the stories, but I recognised the science fiction man who so often featured on the cover of 2000AD.
In fairness, it's not a character design you'd easily forget.

But what stuck in my little mind? More than the big-wheel bike and the warped Americana?
Probably because of those once-upon-a-time comics with anthropomorphic animals, it was the shoulder eagle.
Again, I'm talking specifically about McMahon's Dredd here.
The way McMahon drew it, it was an eagle with personality. It didn't look like an eagle to be at home in a magic wood with the other happy animals. A slap-up tea would not appease it. It was an eagle that looked most likely to take a lunge at you.
If it could speak (and it really looked like it could) it would probably say, 'Creep's still moving – hit him again, Joe.'*

After that there was the Fisher-Price ammo-selector on Dredd's gun. It was ludicrous, but for some reason I thought it was great. He's got a nasty big eagle glaring out from his right shoulder and he's got this clock-face effort on his gun.
Whatever this Judge Dredd looked like, it wasn't a hero.
He didn't have lock of hair falling across his forehead. He didn't have a steely glint in his eye or a winning smile.
He was a stone-faced humourless bastard in a mad uniform.
So yes, it took a while for him to grow on me, I admit.



*And I later discovered that Dredd's name was Joe. How stupidly ordinary was that? It was like Batman's real name being Bruce Batman.

Been a wee while for one of these and as always appreciated, but has it been a deliberate look back on what a 7 year old was looking for in a lawman (not a cadet!)

I was 9 when I got my first taste of Thrill power (1980 Annual) and I was hooked from the off. But looking back it was a poor story collection I mean only one Dredd strip and text strip but for a 9 year old it was enough to ask for more and search out the prog in my local 2nd hand book store so maybe we should give the Regened issues a break, I mean us auld farts don't have to like them, and hope some 7-9 year olds catch whatever we caught back waaay back then and have a life long love for Thrill power.

I miss the era when Ian Gibson's Dredd eagle used to react to what was going on around them - like Garp's scarf :-)

Quote from: JohnW on 28 August, 2023, 07:09:39 PMthere was the Fisher-Price ammo-selector on Dredd's gun. It was ludicrous, but for some reason I thought it was great.

He moves the dial with his finger.  Imagine if every time he holstered it, the dial got pushed around to the sixth setting, just by the action of sliding it snugly into his boot.  A sudden firefight and he'd never know what he was shooting.  "Ricoch-- er, Hi-ex!"

Quote from: JohnW on 28 August, 2023, 07:09:39 PM*And I later discovered that Dredd's name was Joe.

Joe Dredd is a cool name.  Joseph is not.  I think he could be just a "Joe" without being a "Joseph".  It's something that came about because of the Stallone movie and (unbelievably, to me) took root instead of withering away.  That said, the movie did remind me that Americans would indeed call the outside beyond the city walls the "Curse-ed" Earth, rather than the "Curs'd" Earth.

I'm with you on the Joe thing. Like Pineapples, he just isn't a Joseph for me. And, as you say, the Joseph thing only came in after the Stallone film.

Yeah, I'll take Joe over Joseph any day of the week.

Joseph calls to mind a priest insisting on a saint's name at the christening:
"I baptise you Joseph Ignatius in the name of the Father, and of the Son..."

It's easier to imagine the guys at Justice Department Genetic Control looking at the lawman of the future taking shape:
"The clones are coming along nicely. Kids're going to have Fargo's big ugly slab of a face."
"Yup. Going to be an intimidating SOBs, that's for sure."
"Scare the piss outta the cits anyway. We're giving them names to make people – y'know – dread them. How does Judge Fear sound?"
"Judge Fear? I like it. What about first names?
"Who needs a first name? We grow them in a jar; we send 'em to the Academy; we put them on the streets. It's not like they're going to have friends or families or anything."
"But just so's we can tell them apart."
"Jeez, OK – so call that one Joe, and the other one Steve. What do I care?"

Yep, that's the way I would look at it too - first names given by unimaginative Tek-Judges, as an afterthought.  Fred and Ted* would have been my choices.

I picked 'Joseph' as my confirmation name, but in my mind it was 'Joe' of course.  Pretty sure Dredd and Pineapples contributed to my choice.

*Which, now I think of it, are the names of the Cookes, my stand-up comedian mate and his son.  You may or may not know Fred from Dancing with the Stars and the Tommy Tiernan Show, John.

Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 02 September, 2023, 11:39:10 AMYou may or may not know Fred from Dancing with the Stars and the Tommy Tiernan Show, John.

Alas, no. I don't watch a whole lot of TV, so that's your career as a name-dropper coming to a grinding halt. :D

Can a man TRULY call himself a squaxx if he doesn't watch the Irish version of Dancing With the Stars?

A man sits forlorn in an "I Honked On An ABC Warrior And Lived" t-shirt, his LRD filled with supermarket whiskey. Ragged 1980s progs carpet the floor around him. An old congratulatory letter from Tharg is held in his nerveless hand.
It has all been for nothing.
He has been a fraud all along and now the whole world knows it.

Like your whiskey on the back pages of those 80s progs on your floor, the truth would have spilled out (on) Sooner or Later.

Quote from: JohnW on 02 September, 2023, 04:45:57 PMA man sits forlorn in an "I Honked On An ABC Warrior And Lived" t-shirt, his LRD filled with supermarket whiskey. Ragged 1980s progs carpet the floor around him. An old congratulatory letter from Tharg is held in his nerveless hand.
It has all been for nothing.
He has been a fraud all along and now the whole world knows it.

Well on the bright side, at least now I know who's telescope was spying through the window of my new gaff today. Good job I'm getting curtains installed tomorrow.  :D

Quote from: paddykafka on 02 September, 2023, 08:16:04 PMAt least now I know whose telescope was spying through the window of my new gaff today. Good job I'm getting curtains installed tomorrow.  :D

That's not me. I keep myself and my telescope in Cork. It's probably a peeper licensed by Dublin City Council.
Do you have authorisation for those curtains?
What have you got to hide, citizen?

Quote from: JohnW on 02 September, 2023, 08:35:00 PM

Quote from: paddykafka on 02 September, 2023, 08:16:04 PMAt least now I know whose telescope was spying through the window of my new gaff today. Good job I'm getting curtains installed tomorrow.  :D

That's not me. I keep myself and my telescope in Cork. It's probably a peeper licensed by Dublin City Council.
Do you have authorisation for those curtains?
What have you got to hide, citizen?

The less said about my naked, solo Cha-Cha dance around the flat earlier in the week, the better.

'Who are these guys?'

You remember how it was when you owned a comic? Back at the start?
You possessed it. You studied it. You pondered long upon it and discussed its import with friends.
Prog 225 was, I think, only the third copy of 2000AD I'd ever owned.
It gave me much to think about.

I could go through that prog story by story, page by page, and generally appreciate the stuffing out of it. Even after all this time I could take it apart, clean its components, and reassemble it in less than six minutes. It's something of a legendary prog, from what is widely regarded as the strongest run in the history of the Galaxy's Greatest.

But I just want to say something about Strontium Dog.
Bloody hell.
Fuck.
Wow.
 
(https://i.imgur.com/KglYD8z.jpg)


I'd seen bits of 'The Bad Boys Bust'. I'd read at least one episode of 'Portrait of a Mutant'. I knew who Johnny Alpha was and I had a fair idea of what he did. He was the big hero. His mate Wulf was the big sidekick. Johnny was a good man in a bad place. He did what a man had to do while Wulf helped him out and made wisecracks.
But let's cut all that just for the moment. For now, let's just have our heroes step into the frame and kill everyone in the place.
Everyone. Without warning.

'We have you surrounded – drop your guns!' —Nope.
'We have a warrant for your arrest!' —Not that either.
'We're here to bring you to justice!' —Nah.
'We've come to kill you!'
And they have.
And they do.
And they state their names while they do it.

Guy drops his gun and surrenders? No dice.
Guy runs for it? Too late.
One guy gets a chance to send a mayday. We hear it cut off halfway through. Our heroes have been finishing off the wounded.
Johnny Alpha and Wulf Sternhammer: I had a better idea of who these guys were now.

You want a good jumping-on issue?
Try Prog 225. It gave me much to think about.

 

I love that the baddie exclaims "Gunplay!" rather than "Gunfire!" or "Shots!" or "Sneck!" or something much less genteel.

Another great look back - loved the Big bust back in the day even tho I never found the complete run in the local bookstore (2nd hand) where I got my thrill power. I eventually read it as one when I purchased the case files.

Ooh! Can I play? One of my earliest progs was 182 - you can see the cover appeal:

(https://www.2000ad.org/covers/2000ad/mediumres/182.jpg)


Inside, we're introduced to the concept of inter-block wars - but it's also an episode that resets us back to the city after The Judge Child saga, gives us insight into the Council of Five (as they discuss Dredd's judgement) and harks back to Dredd's heroics during the Cal debacle. With McGruder being the main anti-Dredd voice, it also foreshadows the later dynamics of the strip (post-Apocalypse) - with the more blunt foreshadowing being the kernel of what will later become Block Mania:

(https://i.imgur.com/ojuvnKa.png)
Brian Bolland


Jumping forward - the episode of Block Mania where Orlok infiltrates Weather Control provides one of those classic Dredd moments where the villain has the upper hand and the city itself is at stake. It's tempting to opt for either Giant's death scene, or the "I'm with Rowdy Yates" panel, but Orlok's almost poetic half-thought, half-verbalized justification for his killing spree is just amazing comics:

(https://i.imgur.com/pELJoTL.png)
Steve Dillon


When MC-1 has come so close to disaster so many times, there's a sense that the stakes can't be upped - that any villain can't quite make us shiver, because they've all been defeated - whether it's the Sisters of Death, a zombie (or robot) army, or some nuke-happy terrorists. So The Assassination List did things differently and leaned in on our hopes, and then dashed them. The scene where sleeper agent Judge Wile is determined to eliminate the threat posed to his mission by the young pre-cog sisters is the brutal narrative signal that nobody is safe - and that, perhaps, the city is doomed:

(https://i.imgur.com/pMzo6Fh.png)
Leigh Gallagher & Chris Blythe


That's a 32-year narrative throughline - and one of the reasons why it's the GGC.

Quote from: Funt Solo [R] on 12 November, 2023, 06:55:21 PMOoh! Can I play?

The more the effing merrier!

I never saw Bolland's Block War until (I think) an Eagle reprint in the mid-eighties, by which time, of course, I was a veteran of Block Mania (during which I started buying my own progs on the regular).
I also – naturally – knew who McGruder was by the time I read her wonderful, 'Dredd's a good judge – I'm not denying that. But...'

Seminal, foundational, gripping, etc., etc.
I always felt my squaxx-hood was lacking for having missed it first time round.

But as for The Assassination List, I'm afraid I must disqualify. This thread is for first impressions only. The rules clearly state as much ... um, somewhere upthread.
The only stories that may be considered are ones that ran when you had a youthful gleam in your eyes, hope in your heart, and hair on your head that was still its original colour.

Still though, on reflection, I can't deny that you make a strong case, Funt.
Even though The Assassination List ran – when? – last year or thereabouts, there is a strong echo of the great days of yore. (Certainly, it was around then that FOMO got a proper grip on me and obliged me to buy a subscription.)
I forget how long it took me to notice that Day of Chaos was The Apocalypse War: the Return, so it's helpful to have the clever details pointed out.
As you say, the Galaxy's Greatest Comic can be rather good.

Quote from: JohnW on 12 November, 2023, 07:54:38 PMEven though The Assassination List ran – when? – last year or thereabouts

Hardy har! I still think of The Matrix as being quite a modern movie.

I can finagle my way into the first impressions slot by cheating like a politician - y'see, I read The Assassination List after an eight-year hiatus from the prog. So, it was a bit like my second first impressions. Yeah? No?

I hear yez. After nearly 30 years I still think of Sinister Dexter as one of the prog's newer strips.

Lovely write-ups, guys. Keep them coming

Quote from: Funt Solo [R] on 12 November, 2023, 08:28:24 PMI can finagle my way into the first impressions slot by cheating like a politician - y'see, I read The Assassination List after an eight-year hiatus from the prog. So, it was a bit like my second first impressions. Yeah? No?

Well if that's the game we're playing, let me tell you how a long-ago fit of auld lang's syne* caused me to pick up Total War in TPB after Grud knows how long a hiatus.
Henry Flint ascending to full-fledged flintiness?
A two-fisted tale proving that Wagner was still the undisputed pound-for-pound all-time heavyweight champion?
My verdict was that it wasn't the best Dredd tale I'd ever read, but if I'd read it back in the olden days it would have blown the top clean off my eleven-year-old head.

And thus my long journey back from the wilderness continued.
Gather round, boys, and let me tell you all about it...

*Cultural appropriation. I'm not sorry.

Quote from: JohnW on 12 November, 2023, 09:16:19 PMauld lang's syne

I can forgive the cultural appropriation - I cannot forgive the extraneous apostrophe s.

Well damn.
That puts me in my place.
My apologies to you, to Auld Lang, and to all the Scots nation.
It's not as if you didn't have enough to be putting up with.

Ah should hink sae tae.