Jumping the tharg

[GordonR]

We've all heard about the TV shows 'jumping the shark' - ie. the identifiable moment or episode when a previously good series takes a terminal nosedive in quality - so how about applying it to the venerable old 2000AD series of yesteryear?

What was the moment you first throught that Robohunter, Ace Trucking Co or Ant Wars might be seriously going off the boil?

I'll kick off with original Rogue Trooper.  The series definitely jumped the shark when he killed the Traitor General and then they sent him off off to that silly alien planet.  Once he's accomplished his mission and got his revenge, they had to keep making up increasingly dumb reasons for him to stay rogue and keep Helm, Gunnar etc as biochips.

However, controversially, I'd say it actually happened before that, when we got the new improved telekinetic Gunnar.  Biochips can have psychic powers?  No, I didn't buy it either. Terminal silliness had set in, and Rogue was doomed.

Anyway, two rules to the game:

It has to be something with some longevity to it.

And sneery smart-arsed answers along the lines of "Story A - after I read the first panel on the first page of the first episode" will not be tolerated.

[Art]

How about Slaine not dying at the end of The Horned God?

Up until that point Slaine had been brilliant, give or take a role-playing-game crossover, Slaine the king was awesome and though theres a few out there who would criticize the Bisley style of artwork, I'd say that in the case of the Horned god it was pretty damn good. The writing showed a few signs of mills Pagan propaganda but he hadn't turned into a total loony yet, and he tied up all the loose plot threads and Brought the slaine saga to an exciting climax.

...And then Slaine ruled his tribe for a couple of years and went back into the earth...

Except he didn't. He strayed alive, and he came back more and more lame each time until no one could bear to read the fucking thing.

[Leigh S]

Spoilers.
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The original VCs - basically great until the very last installments when (SPOILERS!!!!) Steve Smith finds the Geek homeworld and saves mankind singlehandedly...

[Matt]

The mother of all mistakes...
Chopper dies at the end of Song of the Surfer, one of the most poignant moments in 2K history. Fantastic script by Wagner, beautiful art by Macneil. Chopper slumped on his board, riddled with bullet holes. The point of view pulls out to reveal that he didn't even make it over the finishing line. Then the whole thing is undermined by the totally crap Garth Ennis "Earth, Wind & Fire". Immature schoolboy humour, fart gags, vomit and crap art. Chopper should have stayed dead. The Wagner story was robbed of its emotion and impact by the wank Ennis sequel.

[Matt]

Pretty much agree with the general state of Slaine, although I did enjoy the Treasures of Britain. It used to be my favourite series, now I couldn't even tell you how The Secret Commonwealth finished. Total blank.

[Slippery PD]

Sinister Dexter

good storyline, nice auxilliary characters.  particularly Demi Octavo.  Spent some time establishing Downlode as a place to be.  
1.  Demi was elavated to the QueenPin of Downloade, from gangster Moll to Head gangster.  2.  Then we had Sinister Dexter as Demi's enforcers.
3.  Then we had Eurocrash , a sumptous mega-epic that depicted Demi's death and the downfall fof the hitmen.  

4.  They split up and we get Downlode tales, which showed the differences in attitude between the two.  They eventually get back together and return the status quo.

In stead of an uneasy truce between the two. we get generic crap that is full of puns, bad humour (Oh hes got a funny accent) and no reference to what has gone before.  Thats it RUINED!!!!!!

- Yer Slippo    

[paulvonscott]

Well, Chopper has been taken, though in truth that's only when it had been passed over to Ennis to play with.

So I'll choose Judge Anderson.  And it happened with the wolf story (no spoilers here), I've just read that and Helios again and it's definitely that point.  

It's not badly written, there's a lot I like about this strip (it's the halfway house where I sort of like it, sort of don't) I still like Alan Grant and his writing, it just starts to become a different strip, more mature even.  And I don't mean that in the tits and swearing sense.  I read this when I was starting to feel a little uneasy about 2000AD, sometime after 520 I think.

It just a really dark strip, followed by Helios which is darker, and then it's into Ransom country and I'm lost without a map.  Not really the mega city I know or the character I knew.  Alan Grant's happy with the strip, and he likes the look of Ransom I know.  And so do many others, and even though I can't argue that it's wrong, it's not for me.  I've read Triad, Shmaballa, Satan (nice bit with Dredd at the end, but that's all for me) and some other bits and pieces.

I like to see her turn up in the odd Wagner Dredd as she seems to have a bit of a pschizophrenic personality ;) And I certainly wouldn't want to see her killed off (like that's gonna happen dudes, are you in a coma or what?!)

[GordonR]

Strontium Dog.

The Ragnarok Job, when - with absolutely no previous indication that this was the case - we discover the rather startling fact that Wulf is  really a 10th Century Viking.

I never believed that bollocks for a second.

[Tiplodocus]

DAN DARE must have spent the first two years of 2000AD jumping sharks.

I loved the first one with the aliens and jupiter but then they turned him into a violent Star Trek thing with that lego brick Space Fortress and a bloke with a gun stuck to his hand.

And then they got mixed up in some mad war.

And then they turned him into a half arsed golden clawed super-hero

And then I think a shark ate him because I can't remember him ever getting a final episode...

[John Caliber]

I'm with Paul on the Anderson debacle - years of wasted opportunity.

I recall being ticked off with Nemesis around the time of Book 4. I began to lose interest when Kev O'Neill dropped out, but was disappointed to see the ABC Warriors shovelled into the mix. It seemed like they were there just to pad out a flagging Nemesis mythology. Each Nemesis Book was worse than the last after that point.

[almighty mat]

I enjoyed SinDex right up to the ned of Downlode tales, and I vaguely remember an alright story with Demi's little sister and a giant crocodile aftre that, mainly alright because of Simon Davies's artwork tho'.
For me it went downhill the second that the 'story' stopped, and the Adventures Of Sinister Dexter format came in-as you said Slippo, generic, bad puns and atrocious accents passing for humour. Bugger.

mat

[GordonR]

I LOVED the first few series of Dan Dare when I were a lad.  Don't believe the revisionist "yes, we always knew that Dredd would be the hit story in the comic" nonsense which some people are peddling these days, Dare and Flesh were easily the stand-out strips in the comic's very early days.  Belardonelli's artwork, and freaky stuff like the biogs and their living weapons and spaceships, was simply like nothing I'd ever seen before.

I even liked the Lost Worlds stories.  They were a lot less freaky (and Dane Dare loked like an entirely different guy) but Gibbons' artwork was the big draw.  And, heh, yeah, the Space Fortress did look like a Lego model, which was maybe part of the genius of the idea - you could actually build a toy of it at home to play with!  [And I know, for I was that young Lego-builder...]

But, yeah, the jumping the shark moment finally came with the 'Claw Eternicus' and Dan basically becoming a superhero.  The hoary old "found guilty of a crime he did not commit, Dan must scour the galaxy to prove his innocence!" plot didn't help either.

[Tiplodocus]

Yeah, actually, I think I secretly loved the Space Fortress/Dave Gibbons stories (I fondly remember a planet full of Pilgrims/giant worm things and a mad ice planet) We even had cutaway diagrams of the Fort and the Eagle(?) ships.  

In fact, I'm declaring my love for them loud and proud.  

It was definitely the Cosmic Claw storyline where HOOKJAW got him. (But the Gibbons art was still fantatsic).

[ukdane]

I would say that one of the things that ruined Anderson is that a pivotal plot point appeared in a 2000ad Summer special, and has never been collected in a graphic novel.

I am talking about the Judge Corey story, which was the point at which Anderson begun to question her faith in the judicial system. So for me that has to be the point at which it all went downhill.

[O Lucky Stevie!]

"oh no! gran's put my claw eternicus out for the dustman again! how am i going to scour the galaxy to prove my innocence now?"

i'm in agreeance with your summation  of the earliest days there, gordon. dan dare was my absolute favourite, dredd perhaps my least.

to be honest, the first instance i remember of dredd firing this young lad's imagination was with 'the solar sniper' in prog 21. maybe it was due in part to the inclusion of space travel & monkeys (yay!), but i distinctly remember sitting on the back seat of pop's car, reading me new prog on the way home from a sunny saturday morning's shopping & being taken by dredd's parting shot about, "the worst case of sunburn."

whatever we may say regarding steeve moore's output these days, i thank him for introducing the concept of relativistic time dilation to me &--breathtakingly assisted by massimo belardinelli--vividly illustrating to this small boy the consequences of einstein's physics.

i have to admit that i was disappointed with what i read of 'the legion of lost worlds' (due to nana & pop blaming the progs for causing  nightmares, prog 41 was my last prog for three years until prog 188), due in no small paart to it not being illustrated by belardinelli, who i considered to be the 'real', definitive dan dare artist at the time.

ah, but by then i'd had my heart swept away by shako...

i've wet my knickers!
steven l'enfant terrible