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

Guest post by Rhiannon Lassiter: THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES by Catherynne M. Valente

"As a high concept novel with an idea that sold me instantly, it completely delivers."

Rhiannon Lassiter is an author of science fiction, fantasy, contemporary, magical realism and psychodrama novels for juniors, middle grade and young adults. Her first novel, Hex, was accepted for publication when she was nineteen years old.

Rhiannon’s favourite authors include Ursula LeGuin, Margaret Mahy and Octavia Butler. Her own novels explore themes of identity, change and transition. Her ambition is to be the first writer-in-residence on the Moon.

I like high concept fiction. A lot of my time is spent searching for the Big Idea that has enough in it to sustain me for an entire novel. That’s true of me as a writer and as a reader. So I was immediately drawn to Catherynne M. Valente’s The Refrigerator Monologues, a title that clearly references a concept crossover that is so brilliant it’s incredible it hasn’t been done before.

The Vagina Monologues was an episodic play written by Eve Ensler in 1996, twenty year ago. It was groundbreaking work focusing on women, sexuality and violence. 'Fridging' is a concept with an even longer history but the term was popularised in 1999 by Gail Simone though her website Women In Refrigerators, which compiled a list of female characters in comic books who were killed off as a plot device. 

Valente herself is an award-winning author, a recipient of the Tiptree award for The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden and the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She’s been on my list of authors to explore for some time but this was the first book of hers I’ve read.

It took me some time to get hold of a copy because it was published in the US first and there is no electronic edition, perhaps because the paperback format makes significant use of illustrations by comic book artist Annie Wu.

As a high concept novel with an idea that sold me instantly, it completely delivers. It launches the reader into an invented superhero universe, one with its own original superheroes, super villains and everyone in between. Page Embry, the narrator of the first section is dead “the deadest girl in Deadtown” who lives – or rather doesn’t – in a pocket dimension, a suburban hell, with all the conveniences of modern unlife. She is the President of the Hell Hath Club, a coffee-klatsch of women scorned. During the course of the book, these six women tell their stories, with intermissions for Page to introduce them and enjoy some soul music at the Lethe Café.

The writing is snappy and savage. These women had lives, hopes and dreams, before their stories came abruptly to an end when a villain put a full stop to them. The men they loved were superheroes, and these women’s deaths have served to motivate their next big plot action or their need for revenge. But the women themselves have been forgotten, or were never considered that important, bit part players in a bigger story.

It must have been a huge piece of work to - as Valente mentions in the acknowledgements - “(create) an entire superhero universe to make a point” and yet it’s done with considerable wit and elegance. The reader’s knowledge of this invented universe is largely assumed by the narrators, and it is at once original and recognisable. Characters like Grimdark, a Batmanesque figure, Proessor Yes who is Headmistress of St Ovidius’s School for Wayward Children, or The Arachnochancellor are completely believable creations. The world they inhabit is a superhero universe that hangs together or doesn’t with the right combination of techno babble and magical effects.

The individual chapters work well as monologues, neatly encapsulating the stories of these women: tragically comedic, well paced, mixing foreshadowing and self- reflection. I did wonder if the individual voices were sufficiently differentiated. If you pick up the book at a random page can you tell if it’s wayward child Julia Ash or conceptual artist Daisy Green speaking? And unfortunately, I mostly couldn’t. I think it’s a weakness in the book, although it may be that Valente was going for this precise effect: six women, speaking with one voice. But it’s not a very diverse cast; self-described as “mostly very beautiful and very well read and very angry” but also predominantly white and middle class. I think Valente could have gone further here to give us a richer palette of voices.

The chapter I think is most different is the one from the point of view of wise-cracking Pauline “Polly” Ketch, a villainous sidekick with more than one Bad Daddy. Her section stands out for her sparky villainy although she’s probably the most deluded of the characters, the one who believes her lover and murderer will return for her and bring her back to life. Spoiler, he doesn’t.

That brings me to my other criticism of the book, which again is feature of the authorial intention. There is no redemption arc for these women. They have been variously dead-ended or flatlined, destined to spend eternity in clothes picked out by relatives for them to wear in their coffins. Their monologues and their conversations all concern a world which they won’t be returning to. And although they have created a small semblance of a live for themselves with drinks and music and friendship, their stories have nowhere to go, their monologues end where they began, in Deadtown.

It has to be this way because that’s the big idea of the book. Women in superhero stories are typically foils to men, used and abused to further a male plot of action and violence. We are told from the beginning that Page can’t change. But it makes for a depressing read, despite the wit and sparkle. You want the women to rise up and start again, to see them re-enter the fascinating universe Valente has created. But they can’t and don’t and the book would be weaker if they could. It’s frustrating.

I’m glad to have read this book and I will look for more from Valente who I sense is an author coming into her own superpowers.  I recommend it highly. But I’m not sure how much it would stand the test of a re-read. It does what it says on the tin and it does it well and with flair. If I was left wanting a little bit more, perhaps that’s a sign that I need to read more of her work.