Special feature by Paul Dowswell: THRILL POWER - in praise of 2000 AD

 

"Despite the plainly terrifying nature of some of the stories and characters, there was something  essentially benign about 2000 AD ..."

Paul Dowswell's journey from foolish youth to mithered old codger is near to its end. In between these two points he has written some books and hopes to write some more. His website can be found here. 

A 2000 AD cover from 1983. Here, the unfortunate Bizmo Klutz, who is already 80% bionic parts, falls into a radiation pit. His human remains dissolve, leaving his malfunctioning bionic frame to set out on a quest for human parts …

I have never liked the Superheroes of the Marvel or DC Comic world – Superman, Spiderman, the X-Men et al. I heartily agree with comic author Alan Moore who described this genre as ‘revenge fantasies of the impotent’, although I don’t think the phrase is his own. I can’t be doing with the endless Superhero movies either, although their huge popularity does suggest I’m in a minority. I always had a soft spot for the Beano, though. And graphic novels like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.

I’ve been in ‘Swedish Death Cleaning’ mode these past few months – clearing out our overstuffed attic, and I was fascinated to find two boxes of a moth-eaten sci-fi comic I’d squirrelled away decades ago called 2000 AD. First published in the misty 1970s, by 1980 the comic had really hit its stride and was popular with secondary school kids. I was introduced to it in the early 1980s by my younger brother Alan and liked it so much I bought it every week for the next three or four years, despite being well into my 20s.

2000 AD is mostly famous for its flagship character Judge Dredd, a near-future Judge/Jury/Executioner tasked with keeping law and order in Mega-City-One, a huge and chaotic conurbation making up most of the east coast of the United States. Post nuclear war, and outside of a handful of other vast cities, the North American continent is now a howling hellscape known as The Cursed Earth. The vastly overcrowded cities aren’t much better and ‘The Judges’ are tasked with bringing judgement to law breakers. The comic strip has spawned two films you may be familiar with. The first, a 1995 effort with Sylvester Stalone in the title role, is breathtakingly dreadful. I’d rather be boiled alive than watch it again. Another go, in 2012, is much better, and Karl Urban plays Dredd in a manner more in keeping with the spirit of the comic book. Both films regularly pop up on Netflix and other platforms. If you can bear the graphic violence, the Karl Urban one – Dredd – is very watchable. In truth, both films were hobbled by the fact that the original character is so obviously based on Dirty Harry era Clint Eastwood, and by the time Dredd was popular enough to be made into a film, Eastwood was way too old to play him.

Typically pithy dialogue from the Judge Dredd story ‘The Apocalypse War’ where America goes to war with the 22^nd Century version of the Soviet Union.  

Read again, forty years later, the Dredd stories remain the most engaging in the comic, not least the extraordinarily creepy tale of Judge Death and his three companions: Fire, Fear and Mortis – a parallel-world quartet of unnerving Judges whose mission in life is to wipe out all living things. One story ends with Judge Death captured inside of the mind of the Psychic Judge, Anderson (also featured in the illustration above), and both are then encased in a single plastic cocoon to prevent Death escaping – something to give any child nightmares.

2000 AD’s most terrifying baddies, the four Dark Judges.

But Dredd could also be funny and topical. Here below are a few frames from ‘High Society’, a story where low-life slum dwellers are relocated by Mega City One’s municipal housing department to a posh orbiting satellite for the ultra-wealthy. Another story pits two huge social housing blocks against each other in an all-out war. The buildings are named Carole Munro Block and Vince St Clair Block – the aliases Coronation Street’s Jack and Vera Duckworth adopt when they both surreptitiously sign up to a video dating agency in 1983. And I loved the story about Carl Heinz Pilchards-In-Tomato-Sauce Clayderman – a name inspired by the avant-garde composer Stockhausen and the French easy-listening pianist. At a classical music concert in Mega-City One, the composer turns on his audience and starts murdering them in a variety of ludicrous ways which coincide with his music. Judge Dredd, of course, is in attendance and intervenes…

One Judge Dredd episode from 1984 sees a high society orbital suburb occupied by rehoused slum dwellers from Mega-City One. 

Like its 1980s contemporary the music magazine Smash Hits, the comic was cleverly designed to make the reader feel like they were part of a secret society with its own insider slang. The editor was an alien from Betelgeuse called Tharg (of course he was) forever reassuring his readers their stories were charged with ‘thrill-power’. 2000 AD even invented its own pretend swearwords ‘Grud’, ‘Drokk’ and ‘Stomm’, like ‘Frak’ in Battle Star Galactica and ‘Pigging’ in Jack Rosenthal’s The Dustbinmen.

Reading again from a distance of 40 years it’s easy to see how many of the strips were borrowed from other sci-fi films and books. ‘Rogue Trooper’ for example, owes a debt to Blade Runner, as does ‘Robo-Hunter’, which also comes with a large dose of Sam Spade. ‘Mean Arena’ was clearly inspired by Rollerball. Inspiration also came from history. In ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ a strangely horse-like alien defends his fellow extra-terrestrials from Spanish Inquisition style human space explorers intent on genocide. The stories, illustrated in a detailed steam-punk style, also have more than an echo of the Nazi racial state, with its evil baddies banging on about ‘keeping pure’.

Plagiarism, or maybe it’s ‘homage’, also abounds in Alan Moore’s ‘DR and Quinch’ a cheeky lift from National Lampoon’s OC and Stiggs, itself a deplorable but amusing tale of two repellent high school students from the Eisenhower era who create Olympic standard mischief. Moore’s version is set in the far future and features two bizarre aliens getting up to malevolent high-jinx on their home planet.

Waldo ‘DR’ Dobbs and Quinch fall foul of Judge Thorkwung in the episode ‘DR and Quinch Go Straight’.

But my favourite story of all takes inspiration from E.T. and, incongruously, Boys from the Blackstuff. Running in 1983, ‘Skizz’ is another invention of Alan Moore and reading this again I still found it engaging and moving. Here an alien interpreter from some far-off planet’s diplomatic corps crash-lands in the West Midlands and is taken in by two kindly and unemployed Brummies, Roxy and Loz. They help him learn to speak English and adjust to life on Earth while also keeping him out of the clutches of a brutal South African policeman who bears a passing resemblance to PW Botha, who is working in league with the British military.

Stranded Interpreter Zhcchz (Skizz) is taken in by kindly Brummies Roxy and Loz. Uneasily adjusting to Earth food and atmosphere he vomits frequently, an event he thinks the Earthlings call ‘Flippi-Neck’. 

The copies I have were produced during the high tide of Thatcherism and fortunately 2000 AD was not on the radar of the Daily Mail. The insult ‘Woke’ was, of course, decades away from coinage, but they would have gone into orbit at the comic’s anti-establishment stance. Almost all the characters are either brutal representatives of a repressive state or men and women who have been done wrong by authority.

Like Viz, the quality of the artwork and stories was variable and sometimes you had to sift through a lot of dross to get to the gold. The weekly schedule put tremendous demands on the artists who often produced highly detailed work, so they were rotated to keep to the deadlines. But despite the plainly terrifying nature of some of the stories and characters, there was something essentially benign about 2000 AD. Occasionally a strip would feature editor Tharg and his office ‘droids’ – robot caricatures of the staff and freelancers – and in one story the office is infested by mice. The staff buy mousetraps in an effort to exterminate them but Tharg is having none of it. He opens a space portal, gets out his magic flute, and leads them across space to a planet entirely made of cheese. The snowflake!

2000 AD was formerly published by IPC Magazines Fleetway Publications and currently by Rebellion Developments