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Cypriot headline today:

"UK Sends Junior Eurovision Entry By Mistake"

Made me chuckle.

UKD - Scooch got through because the UK, France, Spain and Germany pay for the whole thing and therefore don't have to go through the semi-finals.  

My 6-year record of voting for the actual winner remains unblemished.  I thought the Serb's performance was astonishing - passionate and committed.  

The British idea that sending a bunch of out-of-work Redcoats to compete with recording artists known throughout Europe once again... didn't work.  Though apparently Malta likes it.

BTW, Turkey have changed their entry... the new one's pap.

For this year, my bet is that Romania will walk away with the prize.  

Turkey might just surprise everybody.  Hip-hop and rap don't traditionally do well at Eurovision, but it's not usually so well done.  Lordi showed that the voters aren't afraid of the new.

Runners-up will include Greece, Russia, Ukraine and Denmark.

United Kingdom is on a mission to get zero points once again with that dreadful song.  What on earth were you thinking?

Writers, on the other hand, can usually be found moodily ignoring their fellow human beings, clutching a glass of something foul.  That's for the first half-hour, of course, after which they can be found underneath the bar, sobbing about their childhood.

nobody makes you drink

Aye, right.

"Generally speaking"?

Don't you mean "speaking from dreadful personal experience"?

Eh? has Lent been and gone already?

Bless me, father, for I have sinned...

When I did this back in January, I hadn't realised it would take so bloody long for the powers that be to approve the thing, and in fact assumed it had disappeared without a trace.

But I was wrong, so here's your chance to honour John Wagner, amuse Alan Grant, and annoy the hell out of Pat Mills.

Don't forget to spread the word...

Link: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/2000AD/" target="_blank">Petition Tony Blair

Must be cos I'm off.  

Spending too much time on the interweb is bad for me, so I'm giving it up for Lent.  

Putting up a thread to tell people this sort of thing is ridiculously self-important, and I apologise.  But it's like fags - you need to tell people you're giving it up, otherwise you don't succeed.

Happy 30th, 2000AD.

Gary -
That's the funniest thing I've seen on the interweb for a long while.

[Judge Dredd: Dishing out rough justice]

Actually, I think it's a pretty good article: deals with the comic's real situation, not the situation as one might like it to be.


Judge Dredd: Dishing out rough justice

The great British sci-fi comic celebrates its 30th birthday on Wednesday - and Judge Dredd has been dishing out rough justice since issue two. Life-long subscriber Nicholas Lezard salutes a home-grown anti-hero who is ageing disgracefully
Published: 25 February 2007

Thirty years ago, my father, who exported newspapers and magazines, came home from work with the first issue of a new comic being launched by IPC. He thought I might be interested in it. As I had already read about it in The Guardian, with worries being expressed as to its violent and politically sensitive content, I most certainly was. I was a 13-year-old boy, after all. The comic had the excitingly futuristic name of 2000 AD.

Last week, I went to my local newsagent's. As is my custom on a Wednesday, I picked up, along with my daily Guardian and bi-weekly Private Eye, my reserved weekly copy of 2000 AD. On the 14 February 2007, issue number 1,524 hit the stands. Apart from a year-long interregnum between 1980 and 1981, I have bought every single one of those issues, trips abroad excepted. The gap in my 2000 AD experience came about because, at 17, I thought myself a little old for such things. I started reading it again at university, when my new best friend showed me what I had been missing. And so I have continued.

You may ask, and I sometimes, albeit most infrequently these days, ask myself, what a notionally grown man is doing reading such material. Well, I also read the Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books, and have even been known to write for them, so I don't feel as if I have been neglecting my intellect. Still, I sometimes have the suspicion that were I French, I would not feel the slightest need to excuse or apologise for this little habit of mine. There, the bande dessinée has a long and noble history of support and endorsement from intellectuals. Although one suspects that even Bernard-Henri Lévy might have to summon all his rhetorical resources to expound the value of a comic which purports to be edited by an alien editor called Tharg and whose title refers, it may not have escaped your notice, to a year which has long since passed ( "I, Tharg, bring you the future", runs the cover line to an early issue from 1977).

One thing I can say is that I am not alone. There are plenty of people who have been reading the comic for a long time. The average age of the readership is late twenties: not quite what you might expect for a sci-fi comic. And the readers are not alone in sticking with the magazine. Its best writers and artists have stuck with it too, and, until the recent death of Tom Frame, so have its letterers (not many people who write the words in speech bubbles become recognised in the wider world, but Frame, because of his work on 2000 AD, did). To name but three, Carlos Ezquerra, John Wagner and Pat Mills, have been with the title from the start - from before the start, to be precise - and are still producing high-class work for it. This is unusual in any publishing-related field. In the world of British comics, it's unheard of. In the world of comics, it's unheard of. It bespeaks the integrity of a fully-realised vision, normally only vouchsafed to the single, autonomous creator.

This could not have been foreseen a few years earlier, when Wagner was editing - of all things - the IPC girls' weeklies Sandie and Princess Tina. After their cancellation in 1973, Wagner was summoned to help Pat Mills edit a new boys' action title, Battle Picture Weekly, presumably more up his street. It was, as Wagner put it, "a reaction to the way comics had been up until then - too safe, too sanitised. Characters never died, nothing ever changed, nothing progressed. It was so unreal and we were fed up with it." Battle Picture Weekly became a huge success; but it was the idea of internal progression and character development that became the grounding idea for one of the more interesting editorial decisions, and the character who, more than any other, defined and explained 2000 AD's achievement: Judge Dredd.

I make no apology for the fact that this article will dwell on Dredd at the expense of all the comic's others. Dredd is, after all, the only British-created comic hero who can be counted among the pantheon of Superman, Batman, The Hulk and the like; but one thing about him that sets him apart from all the others is that he ages in real time. The city he polices, Mega-City One, is set 122 years in the future. It was 2099 in Mega-City One when 2000 AD started; it's now 2129. And Dredd isn't getting any younger. No one thought this was going to be a problem when the comic started; it now represents something of a challenge. (One also has to salute the insouciance which the comic's team showed when faced with the problem of what to call it once the actual year 2000 AD arrived)

Dredd was an inspired solution to the perceived problem of violence, which caused the directors of IPC much anguish in the comic's early days. As David Bishop put it: "Judge Dredd... could be as violent as hell and no one could say a thing because his victims were hideous people who didn't deserve to be alive." Dredd has since mellowed somewhat; and he was always, for the professed anti-authoritarian Pat Mills, an example of how the law could go too far. It was this subtext that The Guardian had, perhaps forgivably, failed to spot in 1977. The newspaper was also bothered by a strip in which thinly-disguised Russians invaded London in 1999 and executed a female Prime Minister, who had a more than passing resemblance to Margaret Thatcher, on the steps of St Paul's. (Almost up to publication date, these villains had in fact been unambiguously Russian, but IPC panicked and the production team had to spend a lot of last-minute time altering the CCCP logos on heavy ordnance and changing the name of the enemy to "The Volgans". Which fooled no one, but did the job.)

Matt Smith, the current editor, who looks unsettlingly young (at a rough guess, about half the age of many of his contributors) has a ready and uncontroversial explanation for the comic's longevity: "It's Britain's best comic; there's the quality of the stories, and it's always stayed true to itself. It's always ploughed its own furrow. There's great affection for it from the writers and artists; and it's part of British popular culture."

All this is true, but it has to be said that, in a sense, it's Britain's only comic, or at least the only one not aimed exclusively at children (such as The Beano) or tied in to TV programmes (such as Doctor Who Magazine). When it started, things were very different: there was a whole raft of competitors and stablemates, many of them aimed at very similar markets and even operating from the same stable. But these would fall by the wayside, sometimes to be absorbed by 2000 AD itself. Readers would become accustomed to seeing another comic title become temporarily incorporated into the masthead; its best characters - such as Starlord's Strontium Dog - assimilated into the magazine until their non-2000 AD origins became forgotten. But now, if 2000 AD ploughs its own furrow, it's because the competition has vacated the field.

In the early 1990s, a slew of new "adult comics", themselves inspired by consciousness of the fact that 2000 AD's original audience was growing up, started appearing - Revolver, Deadline, Crisis - but these didn't last. The content was patchy, the editorial stance not so sure-footed - 2000 AD, and its more "adult", or experimental, off-shoot, The Judge Dredd Megazine, are all that remain. (That the Megazine, with its reliance on old 2000 AD reprints and work commissioned elsewhere to keep the costs of the new stuff down, has survived for 17 years is itself something of a success story, but its success is wholly determined by the continued existence of 2000 AD. Still, any comic whose most popular non-Dredd character is a homosexual-vampire, Vatican-employed exorcist called Devlin Waugh has to have something going for it.)

But as for becoming part of British popular culture, Smith is not exaggerating. Glen Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, can say of proposals to give police officers greater powers of arrest that "If we wanted a Judge Dredd-style system that would probably be the way you might start", and everyone knows what he means. And that someone in such a position not only knows who Judge Dredd is but also regards him as an undesirable model for 21st-century policing is, on each count, pretty amazing - and hugely encouraging.

As it has turned out, many of the comic's prophecies have, if not exactly come to pass, certainly not become ludicrously dated or, indeed, flat-out wrong (with the odd exception, such as the proposal that by 1999 we would be all be suffering under the jackboot of Soviet - sorry, "Volgan" - military might). Certainly, the police state envisaged by Judge Dredd's creators isn't looking any less on the cards.

To see how the creators of Judge Dredd tapped into an archetype with almost chilling perspicacity one need only turn to Richard Sennett's paraphrase of Machiavelli's The Prince in his Authority (written two years into Judge Dredd's existence, but probably not with him consciously in mind): "Machiavelli believed there could be no personal authority without fear playing the ruling hand. The prince in need of inspiring fear was one who had overturned an established dynasty... he had to transform brute force into authority. The majesty of this new ruler depends on his capacity to create a public image for himself of an unfathomable, superior being, whose displeasure is terrible and whose goodness is unpredictable."

This could be usefully printed out and pinned above the desk of any writer starting a new Dredd story. The unfathomability has always been symbolised by the conceit, established very early on, of our never seeing the face beneath Dredd's helmet; and the Judges, it was also established early on, had overturned American presidential authority on the grounds that the last president of the USA was a corrupt warmonger. More recently, the writers have seen fit to supply the detail that the same president had also rigged the polls to ensure his own election. Now who on earth could they be trying to make us think of?

Another reason that 2000 AD has survived - apart from the fact that if you're a budding illustrator or scriptwriter, it is still the best place to send your stuff - is the fact that as its readers have grown up, so have its creators. Their preoccupations change with time, as well. When John Wagner, who had after all been writing Judge Dredd stories since 1977, created, in 1999, the Banzai Battalion, a platoon of miniature robots designed to eradicate slugs, weevils, aphids, and other enemies of fine horticulture (led by Captain Bug Stomper - "He's a legend in garden-pest control!"), the reader could sense a relish at his freedom to deal with the issues which were really bothering him. That the Banzai Battalion could also come into existence under the umbrella of a Judge Dredd story showed the flexibility that had somehow come to exist in the company of this most inflexible of lawmen.

Thirty years later, the circulation is now roughly 20,000 per issue - less than a tenth that of its initial sales. Then again, that's 20,000 more than anyone else is selling in the home-grown sci-fi comic field, and it's enough to keep it viable. Its new owners, Rebellion, would like to see a somewhat larger circulation, but this is hardly an unusual sentiment among media proprietors, and there is a tacit understanding that what with all the competing claims to the adolescent's attention span these days, 20,000 is about as good as you're going to get. Besides, tie-in computer games, which are beginning to emerge, can extend key characters' shelf-life or at least expose a younger audience to them.

We can't make too many claims for 2000 AD as great art, except on its own terms. The comic strip is often the cannibaliser of popular culture, not its inspiration. 2000 AD started because its creators noticed the burgeoning popularity of Star Wars, and not the other way round. But somehow, through the dedication, self-belief and talent of its originators - not to mention the relatively free reign they were given - the comic has escaped its original parasitical status. In a sense, its potential to do just that was always there, and always recognised by its readers. And nowadays, in the boiling cross-currents of popular culture, who can say what influences whom any more? It's all up for grabs, and a magazine with a brief that can extend from prehistoric Europe to the end of the universe can grab pretty much anything it likes.

I wouldn't like to say that 2000 AD will last another 30 years. Even another 10 might be pushing it. But it has already proved it has remarkable regenerative powers. It is one of the great, sustained achievements, and should be acknowledged - £1.75 a week isn't too much to pay for that.

For more information: www.2000adonline.com

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpO48BvFIus" target="_blank">This scene, you mean?

Fantastic.

...and speaks...

I'd never looked at these old ng threads before... now I understand why the oldtimers are always going on about it...

Link: http://groups.google.co.uk/group/alt.comics.2000ad/browse_frm/thread/818e037dce9dde2f/187f05acabaae385?tvc=1&q=alan+mckenzie&hl=en#" target="_blank">The Trial of Alan McKenzie