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[01 - Conjuring Thrills]

01 - Conjuring Thrills

The first wraparound cover, in 1979's prog 144, sets a template whereby Tharg is conjuring up thrills for the benefit and amazement of humanity:




It does that by borrowing (and acknowledging) a classic image from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (presumably rendered on the prog by John Burns from a photograph by Ronald Grant):




The top half is Bolland's rendition of the current (ish) thrill line-up. Oddly for a wraparound, the big-hitters are on the back cover, and Tharg shares prime position on the front with Ro-Jaws and Walter. Hammerstein and Mongrel (from ABC Warriors, but not in this prog) stand alongside Dredd, Slippery Jim DiGriz (from The Stainless Steel Rat) and Black Hawk. Wolfie Smith didn't make the cut:



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David Hine provides another Betelgusian conjuration for 1993's Winter Special, which features some of the mid-90s less regarded thrillage. Top-right is Tracer (perhaps an inspiration for Skip Tracer?), sharing the front with Dredd and Maniac 5. On the back we get Maniac 6, Janus (the Psi we love to loathe), Brigand Doom (whiffy Turpin-hatted zombie freedom fighter) and Tao de Moto:



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The Best of 2000 AD Special Edition [2] from (approximately) 1994 is a glorious affair from Colin MacNeil, that includes lots of familiar faces. Don't be fooled - that's not Zombo on the back next to Tyranny Rex, but The Visible Man!



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Later in '94, Paul Johnson splatters some blood over the horror-themed cover of the sixth Winter Special:



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Lastly for this collection, we project ourselves to 2004 and Clint Langley's cover for prog 1400. You can't keep a good thrill down, so Mongrel, Hammerstein and Dredd are still with us. There's something not quite right about Alpha's helmet, but then, there was only ever one artist who could manage that properly.



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Next: Dredd's under pressure!

[Wrap It Up]

Wrap It Up

2000 AD has had 82 wraparound covers, the JD Megazine has had 21 and there have been approximately (depending on what you count) 20 used for special spin-off publications.

Naturally, your greatest desire is to see a chart that shows how common they've been over the years:

One fwom the vaults:



Art by Chris Weston & Gary Caldwell [gwabbed from pwog 2260 & then cwuelly edited]
Font: CrimeFighter BB

Festive covers, part 5 of 5:



Play "Guess the Artist" on the comments thread!


And here's a fuller version of the Dark Judges one:

I felt bad that I'd not included the full wraparound version of Meg 355 (by Colin MacNeil), so here it is:

I was perfectly willing to believe it had been six years, until I checked my A-Z.

Good grief. Was it really six years since Kingmaker was in the prog?

No. March 2022. Ended on a cliffhanger. Said "Kingmaker returns in 'The Twilight Kingdom'". (In the twilight of our lives, more like.)

The name of the image file contains this: "gregg_staples___by_bibbletang". So, maybe it's Greg Staples?

Ah, no! I did a reverse-image-search (because I'm a web-fu master, motherfunsters!), and apparently it's a 3D model by a dude called Petr Nasirov.

The name of the image file contains this: "gregg_staples___by_bibbletang". So, maybe it's Greg Staples?

Not sure who did the original art on this, maybe someone can help out

Just noticed more evidence that the N-AI-mand entity's first language is binary. The binary thought-clouds at the end of Clanker aren't just random gibberish.

First chunk says "but who am I?".

Then "I... I live..."

Then "so much forgotten..." and "something something the era o..."

(I realize much of the sense of that is translated by the box-outs, but hey-ho.)

Festive covers, part 4 of 5:



Play "Guess the Artist" on the comments thread!

To be fair, it probably wasn't really necessary to show an attempted domestic rape in front of a child just to make the point that misogynists are bad people.

On the other hand, it did a good job of reflecting back on Alpha's own childhood, which also demonstrates that the complaint that the writer hadn't done their research and wasn't playing true to the characters was a bit of an empty complaint.

If you check statistics, you find that domestic abuse-related crimes are on the rise in the UK, so I'm not sure how it would be helpful to brush it under the carpet. Indeed, that's probably one of the reasons it's on the rise - because it is often a hidden crime, and it's difficult to prosecute. Quite brave of 2000 AD to highlight it. We should probably be lauding them, rather than criticizing them, I'm sure we'd all agree. Unless...

I doubt very much you are confused as to what I'm referring to. The guy on the stage who is a thinly veiled cipher for your Jordan Peterson types.

Thank you for explaining what you meant. I genuinely was confused because (as mentioned) the phrase "culture war" is often too broad for me to understand - especially in a case where there are various ways it could be used. I wasn't to know if you were referring to the casual domestic violence, the call-to-organized enslavement of women, the general homoerotic undertones of the main characters, the belief in a supreme being or the focus on Sigyn in the tale of Loki. They're all cultural, and potentially controversial.

I take it you're against misogynists, but you would rather that if they were criticized that they be criticized in a more subtle way?

I notice you didn't mention Judge Dredd

If you think I omitted Dredd because it's secretly a hotbed of pro-fascist support, you're barking up the wrong tree. (One might even suggest that the population of Battersea Dogs Home has escaped to the forest and are all barking up all the trees.) Sure, there will be some viewers of, say, Starship Troopers that don't realize it's an allegory and a critique (perhaps even cheering along at all the bug-stomping). That doesn't mean I would avoid talking about Starship Troopers in terms of it's actual aims.

To return to the point - do you really think 2000 AD, given the points I've already made, is pro-fascist? Did you think that the Stront story in this prog was "culture war crap"? Do you know what "culture war crap" actually means in the context it was used by Heid?

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(Culture war carp is slapping Sunak in the face with a fish every time he says "stop the boats".)

and dragged the Prog into this culture war crap that it manages to avoid most of the time. 2000ad remains one of the last bastions of escapism from conversations that dominate social media and now a lot of mainstream media, I'd rather it stayed that way.

It's difficult to know what you're actually complaining about here, because you've been quite non-specific. My knee-jerk reaction is to look at the things being attacked in the strip - the most obvious of which are domestic violence and the rise of fascism. The thing is - Strontium Dog has always been a story in which Alpha fights for the underdog against whoever is bullying them, and one of the core themes of the strip has always been prejudice against "the other", and the battle against fascism (see Portrait of a Mutant, for example).

In a wider lens, 2000 AD has most often leaned against authoritarianism or thuggery. For examples, you can read this year's Void Runners, Helium, The Night Shifter, Portals & Black Goo, The Out or Proteus Vex. Going back a ways, there's Nemesis as a core example.

So, I'm a bit confused as to what the actual complaint is. I think, partly, that's a problem of modern language around politics. If someone complains about the "culture war", it's not clear what they're complaining about. If someone dislikes "wokeism", I don't know what they dislike. They're dog whistles.