This really is just idle speculative chit chat, so if it annoys you I'm sorry.
But I was just wondering, 2000AD has been going for 25 years, there have been a lot of changes, publishers, editors, writers, artists, stories, logo's, paper quality, paper size, monochromicity (you wot PVS?) and... well, you get the idea.
Yet the format of roughly 5-6 stories of 5-6 pages each has remained. Do you think that the format could change or little too? Perhaps some longer stories, some one-pagers, some articles (which I know always used to be dreadful), some text stories (I can already hear people cry 'Noooooooooo...', perhaps more pages.
I don't know, just something to give it a bit more meat.
I'm not really suggesting it becomes Deadline, and I really don't have any ideas of what I would want, hence this post, but I always feel 2000AD (for all that is good) is just a five minute thrill. I might read a story I like again or skim the letters page, but that's it, it then goes on the pile and is largely forgotten.
Actually, these ideas might work better with the Megazine, which is currently the old 'best of 2000AD' and 'Judge Dredd Megazine' in one.
This sort of thing could work well, those history of 2000AD articles supposed to turn up there seem interesting.
Why change something that is not broken?
2000ad is and always will be the type of comic that is becoming more, and more stand alone in its' values, I mean when all its' peers i.e. Battle, Eagle, Starlord et al have all been swallowed up or closed down 2kad has had that extra vitallity which has kept it alive and made it stronger. It also appeals to us 30 somethings, even if on a nostalgia level.
Where can you buy a comic like 2kad anywhere in the world?
You can't.
I cetainly won't argue with you, all very good points for the status quo there!
I would say however that all those comics died, as so many did, as part of the natural life cycle of comics then. The fact that 2000AD was different, in that it attracted some genuinely great writers & artists who wanted to really explore the medium and so gained a cult following that extended beyond kids kept it alive when kids comics of that ilk no longer survive.
An even better example I guess would be Deadline, often felt to be much cooler than 2000AD that kicked the bucket.
I think a great many of 2000AD's early 90s woes began when the Nerve Centre team started taking their cues from Deadline, to try and give clunky old unfashionable 2000AD some of the same cult status and cool vibes as Deadline.
Trying to turn 2000AD into a paler imitation of another comic which - no matter how many rave mentions it got in The Face - never made a profit in its entire publishing history...way to go, guys.
See also Alan Mackenzie's insistence on running dance music reviews in 2000AD...another masterstroke in totally misjuding or ignoring your readership's tastes.
> See also Alan Mackenzie's insistence on
> running dance music reviews in
> 2000AD...another masterstroke in totally
> misjuding or ignoring your readership's
> tastes.
I _always_ thought that period of attempted trendiness was profoundly embarassing and almost entirely akin to watching your Dad dance ...
Cheers
Jim
"See also Alan Mackenzie's insistence on running dance music reviews in 2000AD...another masterstroke in totally misjuding or ignoring your readership's tastes."
Not all of them.
Just most of them.
But I was on that wavelength. I read Deadline, too.
I quite enjoyed deadline at the start but went off it.
As for 2000AD, if you have to make an effort to be cool, then you aren't. 2000AD may have looked like it just escaped from a 70's comic concentration camp, with little colour and printed on bog paper, but I always thought it was cool already, before they operated on it.
"Begin logo transplant..."
"Are you mad? We haven't even added the dance music references and driven off all the readers under 14!"
"No, we must act now, while the storm holds!"
"Here is the paper you requested master..."
"Good igor good. Now where are all the contents?"
"What do you mean you let the writers escape! You fool Igor!"
ETC
Who was it that did all the dance music reviews, anyway? Godzilla, or something.
he would hover over a circle of women, possibly dancing at weddings and one would be my Mum, then he would cut into the circle and dance in the middle (like the hub of a wheel on a gladiators chariot), then he would knife to one woman dance around her, then cut across to another, all the time these women would be looking and smiling at him as though he were Johnny Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, whilst my Mum would look on aghast at his drunken anticts then gradually drift away to the bar.
Had to get that out of my system, this posting brought it all back to me 'cos at the time 2000ad was reviewing dance music.