Let s All Meet Up In The Year 2000

KIDS OF EARTH: WELCOME TO YOUR FUTURE!

Bearded Benjamin Toenale lives in MegaCity-One in the early 22nd Century. He s an inoffensive, hermit-like oldster who spends most of his time in his apartment contentedly browsing through the hoard of books and magazines he s inherited from his father and grandfather. Until, that is, the Judge s raid! After that he s banged up in an Iso-Cube for ten years charged with possession of Restricted Publications .
Midway through the arrest Judge Dredd momentarily pauses, Why do we hide so much of the past from them? Who decided what they could or could not know? Then he turns and shrugs dismissively, Would anybody care . . .?
The Restricted Publications he grinds beneath his unforgiving boot include Tolkien, Moby Dick, Carlos Castaneda, copies of Crisis and Action, and a 2000 AD Annual 1982.
There are a million million stories in the naked MegaCity. This is just one of them. But for 2000 AD it s now exactly two minutes to midnight.
It began the week the Sex Pistols signed their short-lived contract with A&M records on a trestle-table outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. And the two incidents are not unconnected. Punk has since come and gone, and come again as a cartoon caricature of its former self, and gone again. But the really revolutionary force which was unleashed that spring of 1977 one that shredded and eviscerated conventions, prompted questions pertaining to decency and the corruption of minors in the House, and instigated a continuing cycle of shock innovation is still with us. Stronger than ever.
It began when a green-skinned Betelgeusian called Tharg took up residency in the upper floors of King s Reach Tower and hot-wired it into the Nerve Centre of his mission on Earth. A mission to create the Galaxy s Greatest Comic . He, too, is now gone. Replaced by the more X-File d Covert Agency known as Vector 13. But exactly 20 years on, his legacy is all around us.
Judge Dredd might be the Lawman of the Future who most closely resembles Sylvester Stallone in the stupid but ludicrously-enjoyable movie Sly now claims he wishes he d never made. But Dredd is also the biggest star ever to come out of British comics. He was the first to crack the American market and stomp his law-giving jackboot indelibly across the soft pliable face of the decade s most violently unforgiving dreams. And beyond his implacably stony-faced front-page visage, there s more. Strontium Dog a Mutant Bounty Hunter of the Neural Atrocity, Rogue Trooper a blue-skinned, genetically-engineered soldier of the Nu-Earth future-war,Slaine - Conanesque grotesqueries, Worm-Holes and Warp-Spasms before the dawn of time. And outside the pugilistic slugfest of Testosterone Alley, there s the hip and slim-hipped Venue Blue Jeans, Alan Moore s Halo Jones, the Vampire Bounty HunterDurham Red, and Megacity One sPSI-Judge Anderson.
If, during the 1980s and into the 1990s we were living as Frankie Goes To Hollywood once insisted in a land where Sex and Horror were the New Gods, then 2000 AD was, and still is, always there to visualise its wildest and most extravagant mythologies. Recent media tie-in developments include the formation of Fleetway Film & Television (FFTV) , a new company designed to develop and activate movie and TV projects based around these previously comic-bound characters, learning from the controversial Stallone Hollywood experience.
But, as we approach century s end, it s already exactly two minutes to midnight for Vector 13 s Men-in-Black . . .
For what becomes of 2000 AD in the year 2000 AD?

IN MEGACITY ONE JUSTICE HAS A ploPRICE. AND THE PRICE IS FREEDOM . . . !
Riding the inexorable demographics of the post-war Baby-boom, and benefiting from the lack of electronic home-entertainment opposition, comics enjoyed major league sales through the 1950s and early 1960s, but became a victim of that same inexorable process as the Baby-boom generation hit the middle of its second decade and began to find the rival distractions of sex, rock n roll and career opportunities more urgent than the exploits of frame-by-frame weekly strip heroics.
By the 1970s, UK comics were marooned in a stagnancy of declining sales. Long-established titles were merged, extinct, or existing precariously on a diet of reprints. Newly-launched titles hardly survived long enough to hit double figures.
Only the short-lived Action the diseased (and swiftly censored into conformity) brainspawn of freelance panelogists Pat Mills and John Wagner seemed to signpost a viable direction for the future. Sampling, blending and ransacking ideas from Pop-Shock TV and violent movies, then spiking them with some adrenaline aggro, its brief but sensational success provoked publishers IPC to conjure up the new and modified formula which became the 100% Science Fiction weekly 2000 AD. And comic junkies reduced to scraping a fix from dwindling hits of the recycled 60s scored a massive new injection of Thrill-Power from Tharg s distinctive product.
Prog.1 was dated 26th February 1977, promising a world of Hyper-Heroes Wilder Than Your Wildest Imaginings . Cult newsreader Angela Rippon was pictured announcing the Volgan (read: Soviet) invasion of Britain in the opening strip, giving it an immediate currency value. This, it announced, is the FUTURE YOU WILL BE LIVING IN! : stories from a planet in a bad neighbourhood. It immediately provoked a satisfying meteor-storm of outrage headlines, the Guardian starting out with a flash-story announcing the arrival of a comic with a thermo-nuclear impact.
New Musical Express columnist Mick Farren was quick to add his angle: They have pulled out just about every stop on the level of crushing, mutilating and spindling of human beings, he wrote. Using the familiar 32-page, newsprint format, they have gone further in the direction of gratuitous violence. The format may be cheap but, beyond that, no expense is spared to give the kids a somewhat unpleasant kind of jollies. On average, at least one person dies horribly on every page. In issue five the visible body count runs as high as 38!
The IPC boys comics empire stank. It reeked of complacency, lethargy, old and stupid ideas. It was a kingdom of naff and needed shaking up, says Pat Mills. These people were shit scared of losing their protected fiefdoms, so we stormed straight into their world.
From a perspective of century s end, the launch issues now seem less revolutionary than you d expect. Many routine kids stuff elements are there in booted-up guises. Invasion is a War Resistance strip that just happens to be set in 1999. Flesh is a time-travel Western, a Rawhide with dinosaurs. There s even the obligatory sports strip, albeit only a lethal bone-pulping Rollerball variant with attitude. While even the mighty Judge Dredd, who debuts in issue no.2, starts out as a Zip Nolan Motorcycle Cop in Techno-Trousers. And then there s the New Dan Dare, 1950s SF s most revered and iconic name, grave-robbed and reactivated as a guaranteed attention-grabbing cover star.
But unlike its predecessors, 2000 AD has never been in the business of providing reassuring formulae. Stories come on quick rotation, each one raising the acceptable level of violence. The mag kills off, or periodically rests even its biggest stars. It deliberately confounds complacency and unsettles expectations by throwing together new artist/writer combinations with a ruthless remit to regularly destroy and reinvent its lurid intergalactic infantilism. And while it keeps pandering to primal bloodlust, it also evolves ...
To Pat Mills, 2000 AD was not a vertical progression from previous comics, more a retreat into a darker world, where you could get away with anything. And the resulting rapid turn-over of tales were quick to take advantage of those freedoms, giving scope to a new and soon to be legendary generation of extravagantly gifted writers and artists.
Lavish serials featuring the outlandish robotic ABC Warriors, the spoof costumed-crusader Zenith s alarming excursions into hyper-realism, Bryan Talbot s Nemesis which spanned centuries and continuums, plus equally inspired work from Pat Mills, John Wagner, Dave Gibbons (Judge Dredd), Alan Grant, and Carlos Ezquerra (The Stainless Steel Rat) all made 2000 AD vital in ways that none of its predecessors had ever been. It became a training ground and forcing house of talents rapidly headhunted by rival, and often cross-Atlantic publishers. To current editor David Bishop, finding that talent, nurturing that talent and tearfully waving it goodbye as it crosses the Pond has been 2000 ADs role.
It soon became apparent that it was Student Loan Cheques and Job-Seeker Giros, not schoolkids pocket-money, that was fuelling 2000 ADs growing circulation. Perhaps it was even reconnecting with some of the lost Baby-boomers who d now grown beyond their arid comicless years? Whatever, it enthusiastically upgeared to meet the new maturity, with escalating visceral entrail-splattering and more exploding heads, while it became progressively glossier, with more through-colour saturation and a harder, more experimental edge. And art-spreads to make your gums bleed now vie to include a greater nipple-count and a more clearly defined limp dick content.
But it s Judge Dredd s heavy metal regalia of repression and ultra-violence which most perfectly defines 2000 ADs darkly nihilistic vision. He has featured in all but three issues, and he s getting meaner and nastier all the time. Even to his original scriptwriter, John Wagner, he s that nasty, rotten bastard you love to hate.
It s the precisely satiric wit and meticulously accurate portrayal of the dourly emotionless disciplinarian Dredd, backed up by the awesome power of his LawGiver pistol, set against the teeming insanity of a city of 800m largely unemployed people, which most perfectly captures the black humour stench of all our nightmare tomorrows. His evolution minutely researched by Colin M Jarman and Peter Acton in their excellent Judge Dredd: The Mega-History (Lennard Publ #12.99) charts a path of charred corpses through lethal confrontations with the evil Dark Judges, flying killer Ripperjack Swarms, Mean Machine and his manic Angel Gang, the insane despot Judge Cal, a variety of hideously deformed Cursed Earth Muties, Judge Death from a parallel universe . . . and any unfortunate Jaywalkers who just happen to get in his way during the (aptly named) execution of his duties.
But among these classic episodes, there are other, slighter vignettes of MegaCity One s everyday lunacy like the story of Benjamin Toenale s Restricted Publications , or Uncle Ump, the man who invents Umpty Candy the most wonderful taste the world has ever known. So exquisite is his confectionery formula that rival manufacturers plummet into bankruptcy, people riot in the street for more of his Candy, and even Dredd s electronic Particle Analyser lies about its addictive properties, so that it can get further samples to particle-analyse! So the benevolent Uncle Ump, whose only desire is to bring pleasure to the blighted lives of the unfortunate citizens of the 22nd Century, gets blasted into solitary exile in space, on a one-way ticket to nowhere. Uncle Ump s Umpty Candy The Sweet That Was Too Good To Eat , comments the story s final frame.
Judge Dredd is now the biggest property ever to have emerged from the UK comics industry, a status recognised by his recent elevation into the World Class league of Super-Heroes when DC teamed him with Batman for the Judgement On Gotham Graphic Novel.
Taking a lead from mass-circulation Japanese Manga, or even Italian high-gloss porn cartoon-mags, the humble comic now possesses pretensions to being the dominant adult literature form of the age. Yet in spite of such elevated theory, other UK magazines attempting to ramraid the new adult-orientated market have largely failed to equal the success of 2000 AD. Where the politically radical Crisis, the Hendrix-spaced Deadline, Starlord, and the reactivated Eagle all vanished, it was to be only the most directly Dredd-mania cult-related Judge Dredd Megazine or the Classic Dredd and Classic 2AD reprint titles that survived. Graphic Novel interactions, meanwhile, continue to provide an on-going two-way feed some book-length projects are first trailed as weekly instalments, while other serials get themselves later collected into large-format book editions.
It s a process that keeps 2000 AD at the cutting edge of visual imagination. Clear through to today.
Everywhere you look from big to small screen, and beyond, science fiction is edging cross-media attention further into tomorrow. It s obvious why. World War II has been done to death. And it was too long ago anyway. Napalming peasant villages in Vietnam has only limited high-tech appeal. The USSR s no longer there to fulfil the believable bad guy role any more. There s simply no equal-but-opposite terrestrial power-block around any more.
Aliens, however, plug the Situation Vacant to perfection. They can be anything you want, evil to the max, with the added bonus of absolutely no moralistic qualms when it comes to nuking em. 2000 AD was in there first. It was the comic that took strip-fiction through that hyper-spacial jump-gate. The first to drag comics through the mutating Chernobyl rad-cloud, and then detour through a toxic Sellafield leak to emerge sufficiently radically altered to meet those new expectations.
Former editor Steve MacManus recently told SFX magazine that the only difference is that in the 1970s, 2000 AD was the new kid on the block, 20 years on we re the old man on the block, but pumped full of rejuve drugs. Last year it celebrated its 1,000th issue. This year marks its 20th year of publication. Even Eagle that most legendary artefact of the Baby-boomer generation did not survive long enough to reach either landmark.
It could be argued that, just perhaps, the newly art-respectable, self-consciously serious lit-credibility status is lobotomising some of the fun and irreverence out of the strips. This, it screams frame by frame, is clever stuff. And it is. Even when it occasionally takes time to decipher the incandescent vortex of spiral-splashes into something resembling coherent storylines. That s why the playfully immature alien editor Tharg had to go. 2000 AD outgrew him, and his Rigelian Hot-Shots.
But as the century counts down to zero, 2000 AD has already gone well beyond its initial nuclear strike and flash-floods of adrenaline. It has become purveyor of The Ultimate In Future Fiction. How it s going to grow into the next century, beyond the restrictions of the sell-by date built into its title, will be a story well worth reading. In visual form, frame-by-frame, week-by-week, naturally.
But for 2000 AD it s already two minutes to midnight . . . n