Messages

That's amazing broodblik, thanks for all the detail.

Thanks a lot for the information everyone, much appreciated.

Hey there everyone, I'm afraid that this is a fairly short question with not much discussion but can I please ask: is there a list anywhere which just sets out in one place all of the writers and artists who've been credited on a Judge Dredd strip over the years? There is a short one with some of the more famous artists on the Judge Dredd Wiki but it's clearly quite thin on the ground and not comprehensive. Is there anywhere better to look?

Mega-City One was devastated by the Chaos Bug because the Judges ignored Dredd's advice to sweep over the Fourth Faction's Sov base with a ground attack and instead tried to bomb it from the air. Now Dredd himself repeats the mistake and threatens the planet with a magical pestilence because he passed on an on-foot attack and tried to bomb it from the air. There's some irony for you!

** I was going to add moving Mount Rushmore, but shifting that elsewhere doesn't seem quite so off-the-table as once it was.

They did carve the White Cliffs Of Dover off the bottom of England and rebuild them in Mega-City One! Moving a clutch of stone heads is probably simplicity itself for Judge Dredd-era terraformers.

I understand, but the timelines are still a bit skewiff.

That disruption to publication from the 1980 strike definitely happened, Sanders hasn't misremembered the 1984 strike - I checked Barney, and Prog 164 is dated 10th May 1980 whereas Prog 165 is dated 14th June 1980, leaving a gap of over a month.

As Mr. Bishop says, Misty closed in 1980 but too early in the year for it to be relevant.

There was Fabulous 208, but that only closed in September after being rebranded as Fab Hits - that doesn't seem to be the candidate, both for the long gap between strike and closure and that you wouldn't waste money redesigning and relaunching a magazine that you were specifically aiming to cancel.

The only other candidate is Pink, which according to the My Guy family tree posted up-thread closed in June 1980 (on the very same day that 2000AD came back, it says). That might seem to make it the one Sanders refers to, but and although it's more of a magazine it apparently did have some comic content. Problems with the theory are that the magazine was not cancelled outright but merged into Mates and I can't find any details about the editorial staff being particularly bolshy as Sanders reports. Does anyone know anything more about this one?

Yeah, as a veteran of Warhammer 40,000 and the cheerful nonsense of that setting's total departure from consistent or realistic scale, I've learned to try not to pay too much attention to sci-fi statistics. The number has sufficient zeros for you to convincingly hand-wave that it's "eh, kinda big" and that goes for Mega-City One too!

I can't help but laugh at the speech bubble that reassures the reader that the car was empty and nobody was hurt. Such an unironic application of a Saturday-morning-cartoon trope! It's one of those things that hasn't been exaggerated in the retelling over the decades but was quite literally true - I can even remember specific instances, such as where the Godzilla cartoon reproached me for cheering along to warehouses getting smashed because "would you be so happy if there were people in them?" and most ridiculously the Battletech cartoon insisting to me that the pilot of the battle-suit I had just seen been blown away at point-blank range by a building-sized 'mech had gotten away safely.

Why not even "the 10th of April". After all, I'm not American.

"April 10th" doesn't even make sense. "10th of April" implies "10th [Day] of April" but "April 10th" implies that it's the tenth April, even though there aren't ten months all called April.

Physical sales in shops are actually slightly down, but not by much. But subs and digital are up fourfold.

I'm the sort of person who still goes to HMV to buy CDs so I also like to get physical copies of 2000AD as well. My local newsagent has actually stayed open throughout the lockdown and I've made a point of keeping up going there every week so as to do my bit to support it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alZAEJQn3A0

(12:17 - 15:20)

GREAT doc!

Thanks for sharing the documentary - interesting stuff, although it doesn't have the footage that I was looking for. I suppose we'd have to go direct to the BBC and ask if any tapes survive?

Thank you for the information everyone, this is all very interesting stuff.

Thrill-Power Overload does actually say that 2000AD was affected by two different strikes. It claims that there was a gap of five weeks after the release of Prog 165, over May 1980, at which point Sanders closed the "girls' comic with a high circulation" that I referred to in the OP (p.74-75). Later on, it refers separately to another strike in July 1984 where publication was halted due to a dispute over reading allowances (p.102-103). Sanders is quoted in each incident, so he seems to be sure the two events are distinct ones.

If you say that there were no comic cancellations in 1980, maybe Sanders was just mixing up the order of events?

It's part of the myth and legend of the British comics industry that a copy of Action was torn up on-air on an episode of the current affairs show Nationwide during the moral panic over the title in 1976. It's reported in many articles but I've never actually seen the dirty deed, so I'm curious - do any screenshots of the episode in question or any recordings of it survive, and is there anywhere to actually view it? As Action is the progenitor of 2000AD I'm interested in learning more about the comic's prehistory.

Hey there everyone, I'd like to ask a quick question for the more knowledgeable Squaxx.

I dug my copy of Thrill-Power Overload out of the loft recently and while flicking through it one detail caught my attention. On p.74-75 John Sanders relates how he came within an inch of closing down 2000AD in 1980 following a strike which stopped publication for five weeks. Sanders was eventually prevailed on not to cancel 2000AD because it was too profitable for IPC, but he had to make a statement to the strikers so instead he closed down a "girls' comic with a very high circulation".

I'm not at all familiar with this story and Thrill-Power Overload doesn't go into specifics so I was curious, does anyone know the title of the comic in question, and if there's anywhere where we can read more up on it? I'm just fascinated to learn more about the comic that died so that 2000AD might live.

I doubt that kids themselves are buying the all-ages editions of 2000AD - rather, it's more likely that parents are buying the all-ages 2000AD so that when they sit down for their afternoon reading they have something they can share with their kids... or, alternatively, the sort of adults who review Nicktoons on Twitter are just buying it for themselves. In any case, seeing as they've revived the all-ages takeover multiple times now it's a strategy that's clearly working to bump up the sales figures.