Dance Our Way Out Of Our Constrictions: INTRO ’78

Previously on Discourse 2000: After successfully helping launch war comic Battle, editor Pat Mills had the opportunity to launch a new kind of boys’ comic at publishers IPC – Action, a title which turned the violence and grittiness of typical boys genres like sports and war stories up a notch, and drew on adult media hits like Dirty Harry and Jaws to create its most popular strips. Action was a huge success, but its no-holds-barred approach drew the fire of the British establishment and it was briefly withdrawn from sale to return in a far tamer form.

Mills meanwhile had moved on to create a new comic, 2000AD, which applied the Action formula to science fiction, after a memo from IPC staffer Kelvin Gosnell shrewdly predicted a coming wave of interest in the genre. 2000AD launched in the shadow of the Action controversy, but had a major advantage – its violence was against cyborgs, dinosaurs, and fictional invaders and was thus safer.

Even so, Mills left little to chance. Disliking typical sci-fi tropes like robots he developed more down to earth stories, each of which could credibly be a reader favourite, with strong, anti-authoritarian heroes in common. A revival of 50s legend Dan Dare led the charge, but bionic secret agent MACH 1 and future cop Judge Dredd – created by Mills’ close collaborator John Wagner – were the strips that hit hardest with readers. Tying the comic together was fictional editor Tharg, an egotistical alien whose invented language became a shared vocabulary for fans. 

But the most important decision Mills took was to raise the page count per story from the 3 or 4 pages standard in Action to 5 or 6, allowing much more room for the dynamic artwork he knew a science fiction comic would need. This in turn let him attract a new generation of British artists like Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Mick McMahon and his editorial assistant Kevin O’Neill, whose work would come to define the look of 2000AD.

2000AD was a strong launch, and developed rapidly over its first year, with Mills’ anti-authoritarian venom meshing well with the streak of dark humour Wagner brought to Dredd and polar bear saga Shako. Mills stepped back from editorial duties after a few months, handing over to Kelvin Gosnell. 2000AD’s first year was a success, but multiple challenges loomed. The promised wave of interest in SF was breaking, with the UK release of Star Wars. The original line-up of strips were coming to a natural end, and replacements were needed. The more conservative elements of IPC management were deeply unsure about the noisy, maverick team who produced the comic. And John Sanders, the IPC Youth Group boss, was already planning 2000AD’s successor…  

DISCOURSE 2000: 1978

1. Dance Our Way Out Of Our Constrictions: INTRO
2. DAN DARE ’78
3. THE VISIBLE MAN
4. COLONY EARTH
5. MACH 1 ’78/ MACH ZERO
6. WALTER THE WOBOT
7. JUDGE DREDD: THE CURSED EARTH
8. DEATH PLANET
9. ANT WARS

The history of 2000AD is partly the history of overlapping groups of creators – I want to say “factions” but that’s not really fair; they aren’t usually in any kind of conflict, and their borders are porous – who are prominent and influential over the comic at different times. 1978, one of the most turbulent periods in 2000AD’s history, is partly a moment of transition between these groups – between, in fact, different ideas of what a science fiction comic is and could be. 

The axes that separate the groups are often their relationships to IPC, and to comics fandom, and to 2000AD itself. In the late 70s – and beyond – IPC itself sees comics as product, like any other periodical. They are produced in bulk, as they have been for decades, and the only important standards to measure them by are sales and profitability. This isn’t to say quality is irrelevant to IPC. Like anyone in the business of commercial art, quality is important to them inasmuch as it’s important to their end customers, who are subject to continual churn (kids get older and grow out of comics) and are alert to changing fashions and peer group tastes: no kid wants to be passing an uncool comic around the playground. 

So quality matters to IPC because it’s an effective source of competitive advantage that pushes sales up. It’s a lever to pull, like price or promotional activity or distribution advantages, and part of what gives IPC any reputation it might have among its primary customers, the retailers. But this definition of quality doesn’t leave a great deal of room for novelty or risk.

So the first group of creators are the professionals. These are people in editorial, and some of the veteran creators who work on 2000AD early on, like writer Tom Tully. They are broadly aligned with the IPC view of comics – at their best they produce strips to a high degree of craft and skill and reliability (especially in terms of the artwork) at the behest of editors with a solid grasp on what kids will enjoy and buy. For much of the early history of 2000AD, the highest selling IPC boys’ paper is Tiger, which did this very well while pushing almost no boundaries.

But by the mid 70s things are changing. They see the rise of a younger group of creators who we’ll call the rebels, obviously led by Pat Mills and John Wagner and also including Kelvin Gosnell in his editorial days and later Alan Grant. The rebels are new blood with a forthright view that kids want something harder edged and more streetwise than IPC have been giving them. 

But they have something vitally important in common with the ‘professionals’: both approaches believe in 2000AD as a pop phenomenon, a mass market proposition whose value, artistically as well as commercially, lies in grabbing the imagination of as many kids as possible. John Sanders isn’t repeatedly hiring Pat Mills to create comics because Mills is an iconoclast; he’s hiring Mills because Mills has the ability to give Sanders what he wants – commercial, successful publications. 

The context in which people like Mills and Wagner get freer rein is a context of decline. IPC are an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of a company – if Sanders is asking a guy like Mills to fix things, chances are something’s broke. British comics sales for older kids – tweens, let alone teens – are falling long-term across the 1970s, pushed aside by other media: TV and cinema mainly get the blame. Mills’ idea is that the way to fight this trend is to use comics to present an exaggerated, more vibrant (and sometimes violent) take on what kids are seeing – or not being allowed to see – elsewhere. 

And this is the main difference between the rebels and the professionals. Mills and company had come to realise this could only be done by creating as distinctive an identity as possible outside the rest of IPC, and insisting on the changes that would cement that while delivering greater artistic freedom, from Mills’ decision to run longer story lengths to Kevin O’Neill’s unilateral addition of creator credits. (Mills is still a passionate believer in a mass market for comics, pointing to France, where his Requiem: Vampire Knight series has been a success)

In the short to medium term, this works. IPC’s successful 70s launches slow, even sometimes temporarily stop, the long-term decline in comics readers, and as a slice of the publisher’s business the Youth Group grows more prominent. But the overall decline continues – sales leaders Tiger and Tammy are gone by 1985, and when 2000AD is sold to Robert Maxwell’s Fleetway in 1988, it’s reportedly selling about 100,000 copies a week – a very strong figure for the time but a number that might have got it cancelled a decade earlier. 

But the rebels’ success means that something happens: 2000AD, unlike any previous IPC comic, gets the attention, and very quickly the warm approval, of comics fandom. And so we have a third group: the fans. The fan element are into American comics and broader sci-fi media – if you look at fanzines from 1977, British comics are barely worth a mention. Fans shape 2000AD from the beginning: the British “golden generation” of artists like Gibbons and Bolland all loved Silver Age DCs, and were doing regular fanzine work while making a shift to professional art via the British weeklies. 

Editorially, fan involvement in 2000AD also starts very early, with Nick Landau’s recruitment as assistant editor after he got hold of Mills for a fanzine interview. Landau isn’t much of a creator, and he never officially edits the comic, but he’s one of the most significant figures in the story of 2000AD in 1978. He’s from the same fan scene as later editors Richard Burton and Alan McKenzie, and by the time he joined 2000AD he was already running an import and distribution service for US comics.

The fan element has a distinct aesthetic approach to 2000AD, and to comics in general. To the professionals and the rebels, weekly comics publishing was a pop phenomenon: you wanted as broad an appeal as possible to capture a big chunk of your target market and create buzz and playground word of mouth. The fan element loves 2000AD as a showcase for comic artistry and for the SF genre, and to simplify, they see it as a chance to make UK comics credible and respectable.

The fans are, ultimately, trying to tackle the same problem as the professionals and rebels – how do you succeed within a declining market? You might think that the fan element aren’t as concerned about the money end of success, but this is far from the case. Nick Landau in particular is an entrepreneur; by the time he leaves 2000AD after an extremely significant year there, he doesn’t just have a distribution service, he’s a partner in Forbidden Planet, a specialist shop he set up because said distributor’s main customer was about to go under leaving them sitting on a heap of stock.

Landau’s vision of what British comics can be is as strong and important as Pat Mills’, but operating on very different assumptions. In one sense, the Mills and the Landau position are based around a classic marketing opposition – reach vs loyalty. The Pat Mills and IPC position is that what the UK comics industry needs is reach – finding more customers. Its main problem is that kids are stopping buying comics. If you tell stories that can compete with the most exciting things those kids are seeing elsewhere, more kids will buy your comic, and ultimately more kids will buy comics in general.

The Nick Landau and Forbidden Planet analysis of the situation, though, is based not on reach but on loyalty. New customers are good and important, but the decline in readership is a fact of life, and most of your growth is going to come from keeping and growing your existing customers, for instance by selling them merchandise, collected editions, introducing them to other comics, or just giving them the TV- and cinema-related items they want instead of comics.

From a broader perspective, both the loyalty and the reach approach mean a more profitable UK comics industry. From a “what should 2000AD be like?” perspective, though, they can imply different things. “Win over a wider audience” and “keep your fans loyal” are only compatible if you believe the fans are representative of the wider audience, and John Sanders and Pat Mills did not believe this. Which is why they were so cagey about bringing fans on board (Mills was impressed by Landau, but told him to keep his fandom quiet in his job interview).

But the miracle of early 2000AD turned out to be that you could, in fact, do both. The title was able to grow up with its early readership and give them more sophisticated material, meaning a mid-table sales performer for IPC turned into a market leader by sheer stability. Some of the claims for what it was selling are exaggerated but it seems to have been a remarkably stable comic until the late 80s, even as all its peers and competitors crumbled away.

As we move past the upheavals of 1978 and into the 1980s, this combination of mass market stability and fan friendliness will prove extremely powerful. Even as 2000AD remains far from entirely safe within IPC, and even though it’s still running a lot of jejune or downright bad material, it rapidly becomes the cultural centre of British comics at a time when the idea that British comics might involve more sophisticated or adult readers is on the rise. 

And this means it attracts a fourth group of creators, the outsiders: people who built their rep elsewhere in the burgeoning UK comics scene, on underground comix or music paper strips or post-2000AD alternatives like Warrior, but come in to work on 2000AD because it’s the biggest game in town. People like Alan Moore, Bryan Talbot, Pete Milligan, Grant Morrison and Brendan McCarthy. And this era, when 2000AD is simultaneously anti-establishment in traditional comic terms, and the new establishment for a rising generation of comics people, becomes the Prog’s most creatively exciting yet. Which leads, eventually, to a fifth group of creators – a wave of fandom where what people are a fan of is 2000AD itself.

This is all far in the future. In 1978, the question of what 2000AD is going to be is a very open one. The most significant event of the year is the launch of a second weekly IPC sci-fi comic, Star Lord, which splits the 2000AD editorial team, puts huge strain on creators, and could have spelt the end of the comic. Instead it’s 2000AD’s salvation, as Star Lord merges into the older title and brings its two best strips across.

So for the 1978 season of Discourse 2000 I’ll be splitting it into two halves. The first will look at the leftover stories from the launch – Dan Dare and MACH 1 – and the series of short replacement strips like Colony Earth and Death Planet which tried to fuse more traditional SF concepts with the 2000AD storytelling style. And it’ll consider Mills’ great epic contribution to Dredd’s mythology – The Cursed Earth.

The second half will kick off with a long exploration of the life and death of Star Lord, and the backstage turbulence around it. And then we’ll look at 2000AD’s late-78 renaissance, with the Star Lord imports, Robo-Hunter, and John Wagner’s return to Dredd with his saga of fascist insanity, The Day The Law Died.

Borag Thungg, readers, and I hope you enjoy yourselves.