I Was Shocked To Find What Was Allowed: THE VISIBLE MAN

This is a post in the Discourse 2000 series, looking at 2000AD story by story, year by year.

Which Thrill? A daredevil gets into a car accident and ends up with transparent skin. Hijinks ensue.

GOT A HEADFUL OF IDEAS AND IT’S DRIVING ME INSANE

As the ‘first five’ strips ran their course, Kelvin Gosnell and Nick Landau replaced them with a series of short-run stories, some holdovers from 2000AD’s development phase, others new  commissions from IPC Youth Group regulars. When histories of 2000AD are written they tend to lump these late 70s stories – Colony Earth, Death Planet, Angel and Project: Overkill – together as early failures. Not long enough or, frankly, popular enough to be collected individually, the stories have only been reprinted as part of grab-bag collections. The Visible Man is often counted as part of this wave of brief, disliked stories, and on length criteria it certainly fits. Pat Mills’ and Trigo’s story of a man with transparent skin runs to only six parts – barely the length of a single American comic book. 

In some ways the short thrills do look forward in 2000AD history – one-off short series become a regular part of Tharg’s mix; some are genuine highlights, and it’s interesting seeing creators figure out what works for the Prog in this format. But they also prove how unusual the comic’s opening salvo was. Pat Mills developed the initial stories (and Judge Dredd) as “all No 1s”; features so inherently strong, and with such potential for continued storytelling, that there would be no need to rush any to a conclusion or find quick replacements.

It was another reaction against the standard adventure comic formula, which ran to 8 or 9 strips. Some of these would inevitably be weaker, leading to a set-up of a few perennial stars supported by short-run strips in a continuous churn. At this point in Battle, three years old by now and firmly established, pilot Johnny Red and veteran taskmaster The Sarge were bringing readers in every week. That left room for strips like Mills’ Samurai as brief two- or three-month experiments. But with 2000AD having only 5 or 6 strips, it should be possible to keep the quality higher, leading to a more stable, more popular and better comic.

Mills’ bet looked to have paid off, with all but one of 2000AD’s starting line-up lasting six months, and that one (Flesh) replaced the issue after it ended by the surface-similar Shako. (For comparison, three of Action’s opening stories were gone by the 12th weekly issue.) For Gosnell’s part, he wanted to take the idea even further, and started to develop Star Lord as a monthly title with only two strips which could be developed to an unprecedented level of quality.

But meanwhile the 2000AD experiment had a flipside. If stories did end, there was little wiggle room in commissioning new ones. Get too many wrong and you’d be back in the standard pattern, with one or two reliable features carrying the Prog through a churn of shorter stories. And as the parade of semi-forgotten Thrills suggests, that’s basically what happened: as 1978 wore on, 2000AD began to revert to the IPC mean.

The Visible Man fits into that parade, but as a Pat Mills solo script it also harks back to 2000AD’s origins. It showed up in the dummy issue of AD 2000 that Mills presented to IPC near the end of 1976, and at that point it wasn’t much more than a gross, awesome Trigo visual, a human whose skin was entirely translucent, meaning the world could see his every organ working, like a living example of the plasticised corpses in Body Worlds exhibitions. “It’s horrible!” the man screams, just to rub it in.

This walking anatomy lesson made for a sick, memorable image but Mills decided it was wrong for the launch of 2000AD. That was a good decision. Frank Hart getting his organs out would have jacked up the gross value of Prog 1 – certainly a positive for the audience. But where would the strip go from there, with Frank on the run from the scientists who want to use him as a medical guinea pig? In the story as it saw print, The Visible Man is ultimately a reactive character. He is constantly chased and abused by others, and his efforts to help his own situation come to nothing until the very end. He has an unusually low level of agency for a 2000AD protagonist.

More to the point, he has a very low level of agency for a Pat Mills protagonist, which in the early days of 2000AD amounted to roughly the same thing. Frank Hart, from what little we see of him before he meets the radioactive sludge that gives him see-through skin, is not a natural anti-authoritarian. He’s a successful guy, a playboy even, a thrill-seeker who likes fast cars and beautiful women. Standard operating procedure in a Mills strip is to show us a tough guy who a corrupt system can’t understand or contain: Frank, on the other hand, is a privileged man who gets everything taken away from him. He has anti-authoritarianism thrust upon him, as he realises he can’t trust the doctors and scientists hoping to “help” him. But as a walking horror he has even less ability to do anything about it than an average dude, let alone a badass narrative enforcer like Bill Savage. The Visible Man isn’t just a visual, body-horror story. Within the terms set by the rest of 2000AD it’s a psychological horror too – an lesson in what Authority will do to you when it decides you’re its object.

This is another reason the strip was not a good fit with the launch – Prog 1 was a consistent package, a set of stories which outlined the base case for a 2000AD hero; The Visible Man sits outside that. But he doesn’t sit outside the broader spectrum of the stories Pat Mills had been writing for IPC.

IT’S A SHAME THE WAY SHE MAKES ME SCRUB THE FLOOR

When talking about the IPC ‘comic revolution’ of the 1970s, Mills doesn’t date it to his development of Battle with John Wagner in 1974. Instead he sees the real starting point as three years earlier, with Gerry Finley-Day helming the launch of new girls’ title Tammy. The IPC girls’ titles were strong sellers which benefitted hugely from IPC’s close ties with Spanish and Italian studios. European artists provided an expressive subtlety, particularly when it came to faces and body language – a perfect skill for stories based more on melodrama than physical action.

With Tammy, this wave of artistry got the stories it deserved. Plenty of previous girls’ comic stories had mixed elements of misfortune, tragedy and fear into their tales of school drama, girls’ hobbies, and mystical intrigue. But the sheer concentration of hard-luck stories, trauma and tragedy that Finley-Day included in Tammy is by all accounts something new. Of the 9 strips in its opening line-up only one – the comic misadventures of Courier Carol – offered laughter mixed in with the relentless dread and injustice. It wasn’t until the comic absorbed stablemate Sally after 3 months of unrelenting gloom that more light-hearted strips could be grafted in. 

And – at least according to the partisan Mills – Tammy pushed those dark elements harder and further than competitors, mixing them with a degree of social realism and more prominent working-class characters. The longest-running story of Tammy’s opening line-up, No Tears For Molly (later Molly Mills) is one example. Molly is an East End girl forced to work as a servant to support her widowed mother, and each minor triumph – sending a postal order to Mum; helping a horse destined for the knackers’ yard – is balanced by new danger; her evil butler boss beats her, the idle stable boy blames her for a fire. Writer Maureen Spurgeon provided concentrated drama and constant reversals of fortune, a recipe repeated in three page instalments across every other story in the comic.

No Tears For Molly is an example of the “cinderella story”, one of Tammy’s most successful subgenres – Molly’s arduous path was trodden many times over by fellow orphans and servant girls. But Tammy’s most notorious early story was Finley-Day’s Slaves Of War Orphan Farm, from another subgenre Tammy made its own. It was the defining example of the hair-raisingly named “group slave story”, where the heroine is one of a bunch of kids forced into dreadful servitude. She fights back, meaning she bears the brunt of whatever terrible cruelties the writer can conjure up. (In the case of War Orphan Farm, Finley-Day added extra shock value by naming the chief tormentor Ma Thatcher, after the Tories’ new Education Secretary).

A third style Tammy successfully exploited was a weird mystery subgenre: strips that built themselves around baffling goings-on, leaving readers on the hook as to what on earth the explanation could be. All these were formats that played on their readers’ appetites for tragedy and suspense but also credited them with sophistication and patience to see a story through to its conclusion.

Tammy’s remorseless melodrama was an enormous, continued success – in a sector prone to mergers between titles it lasted an impressive 13 years before vanishing in an act of management revenge after the 1984 NUJ strike. Mills’ experience as a freelance sub-editor with Finley-Day and Tammy was an admitted inspiration for his later work injecting greater grit and realism into war, adventure and sci-fi titles. But the specific winning formulae of the girls’ comics didn’t travel so well. In a fascinating interview with girls’ comic historian Jenni Scott, Mills talked about failed attempts to run slave and mystery stories in the boys’ titles – strips like Battle’s Terror Beyond The Bamboo Curtain, a weird mystery story set in a Japanese POW camp, which opened strongly but bored and confused readers looking for the more direct approaches in the rest of Battle. Like a group of adolescent D&D players who ignore the plot and want to fight everything they see, readers wondered why the heroes didn’t simply brush aside the bamboo curtain and kick some arse.

Mills doesn’t mention The Visible Man in his interview with Scott, but it feels very much in this lineage, an attempt to do the kind of traumatic the-world-against-me melodrama you might see in a girls’ title but combine it with visceral body horror in a way 2000AD readers would respect more. Unusually for a 2000AD story The Visible Man focuses heavily on Frank’s emotional state, not just on what he’s doing – it lingers on his fear, his desperation, his anger as people he hoped he could trust react to him with sheer horror. The result is the most intense and odd story 2000AD had run at this point.

Like a lot of successful childrens’ writers, Mills and Finley-Day understood the cruel streak kids often enjoy in their fiction, a desire to see awful things happen within the safety of a story and an understanding of genre. At the base of this was their belief that kids have a sophisticated conception of genre and its expectations. The shocking violence of 2000AD heroes is legitimate given their monstrous or robotic opposition; the grotesque suffering of Tammy heroines is mitigated by the understanding that eventually – in some far off story – it will end happily.

Even so, the creators of 2000AD wanted to push against some of those remaining assumptions. Wartime and futuristic settings offered more opportunity to tell stories that could end unhappily or ambiguously. John Wagner had led the way here, with the 1976 strip Darkie’s Mob in Battle, about a group of defeated British soldiers in Burma who find themselves under the command of the psychopathic Captain Joe Darkie. The casualty rate is high across the strip’s year-long run, with the framing device of a bloodied journal making it clear that nobody is leaving the ‘Mob’ alive. The series was widely criticised and, of course, enormously popular.

Lessons were learned by 2000AD’s writers – whether they were the right lessons is another question – and 1978 sees a hecatomb of characters. We’ve already seen how Inferno and Dan Dare ended with their cast being slaughtered, and we’ll see other supporting characters and heroes killed off across these entries. After a brief run full of struggle, betrayal and trauma, the Visible Man survives – even triumphs, after a fashion – but it’s hardly a traditional victory. He ends the strip alone in an experimental space probe, joyfully free at last of the forces looking to use and abuse him, happy to pay the cost of complete isolation from the human race. What brought him to this point?

EVERYBODY WANTS ME TO BE JUST LIKE THEM

For a short story, the Visible Man is a complex and furious one. The anger starts with the title, on one level just a nice riff on H G Wells. But anything plus “Man” carries a different weight by the 1970s, after decades of Superman and Spider-Man and years of the Bionic Man and the Six Million Dollar Man. The Visible Man is, as well as everything else, a chance for Mills to take aim at one of his great lasting hatreds: superheroes.

Mills has written for mainstream Marvel – he created a futuristic version of the vigilante Punisher for them – but his main engagement with superheroes is the 1987 creator-owned series with Kevin O’Neill, Marshal Law, for Marvel’s Epic imprint. This joyfully depicts the cape and cowl crowd as sadists, perverts, CIA flunkies, drug addicts, criminals, and general scumbags for “hero hunter” Marshal Law to wipe out. The idea of superheroes as flawed or outright fucked-up was not an uncommon theme in the late 80s, during the wave of comics interrogating and exploiting the idea of “adult” superheroes. 

But Mills had a particular advantage: he really fucking hated superhero comics. He was early to the idea that they were glib, crypto-fascist power fantasies whose bright colours and vigilante solutions were a smokescreen for the operations of real power (especially American power: Marshal Law’s origin is as a super-soldier for clandestine wars in Central America). On Marshal Law this hatred manifests as an orgy of riotous vengeance with O’Neill’s angular, BDSM-inspired character designs merging sex, death and violence into an entertaining, exhausting screed.

Obviously the Visible Man doesn’t touch on that kind of extremity. But I still read the strip as a sideways critique of the idea of the American superhero. Its title and opening scene could be a superhero origin – an ordinary guy turned extraordinary by an accidental encounter with an experimental chemical. When Frank Hart awakens in a darkened room he immediately realises something’s wrong, and the revelation of exactly what is the definitive visual moment in the strip, artist Trigo relishing the chance to be as grimly detailed as he can. Frank has been given a unique ability, just like a superhero, but Mills is brutally honest about what that might entail – immediate incarceration and experiment in a world of “norms” who entirely reject the “freak” who walks among them.

Frank breaks free, but every episode after that sees him sink lower, as his attempts to evade his fate collapse and he’s driven gradually mad. Mills’ narration switches more and more to a pointed, taunting second-person as his protagonist crumbles, sleeping rough and escaping his nightmare new life only in dreams. This, for Mills, is the likelier fate of someone suddenly singled out from the norm – not heroism, but utter isolation.

By the time Frank Hart lies dreaming in an alleyway The Visible Man has become overtly a horror comic, written with a streak of cruel black humour: Frank attempts to tan himself only to almost burn his internal organs; he uses make-up to try and appear normal but of course it melts off his face. The tight story length means Mills has no incentive to string anything out – the ghastly incidents follow one upon another with a relentless cruelty even Tammy readers might have blanched at.

Eventually Frank gives in and returns to the lab – a second artist, Montero, has taken over the strip and gives us a remarkable image of dozens of cops converging on the phone box (that superheroic site!) where Frank is calling the doctor to make a deal. By now story is explicitly contrasting “freak” Frank with the ordinary lives of the “norms” – he crashes a wedding and guzzles cake while the guests scream. Frank is both rupture and resource – the lab is determined to send him into space to directly observe the effects of G-Force on the body.

Before he goes, there’s one final, subtle horror – it’s revealed that the doctor has an antidote for Frank, a chemical that can make his skin opaque again and end his suffering. The last straw for the Visible Man comes as he realises the scientists will simply never use it – they will always have some new pet project they need him for. His suffering is a choice, and as he realises that he makes his own choice, setting the controls of the space probe to drift away from Earth. (The strip makes a point of saying he has enough food pills for a lifetime, to blunt the otherwise clear implication that a lead 2000AD character is committing suicide.)  

At the end of the story the body horror and the systemic horror of The Visible Man have merged. The skin, the strip says, is what makes us human; strip it away and our status as objects in thrall to power is exposed. Plenty of readers have seen the story as an attack on animal experimentation, and that’s certainly an element – the plans the doctors have to test and observe Frank usually involve the kind of treatments meted out on lab animals, like induction of diseases. But like Flesh, The Visible Man is a grab-bag of furious metaphors, this time centred around dehumanisation – animal rights, the treatment of disabled people, abuse of state power and even surveillance culture, with the space probe Frank ends up in wired with a camera trained on each individual organ. 

The Visible Man is about the terror of becoming visible, not just in the story’s literal, disgusting sense but in the sense of suddenly being noticed by the system you’ve blithely spent your life in. To be visible – a person of interest in the eyes of Authority – is horrifying and inescapable. This is why Frank Hart is a rarity in a Mills strip – a successful, handsome, middle-class guy. His privilege means he’s entirely unprepared for the shock of visibility, and it destroys him.

This makes him a very different proposition from the “hyper heroes” 2000AD advertised at first. In terms of style, The Visible Man fits squarely into the breathless, brutal mode of 1977 2000AD, but its format and content marks it out: it’s tight, nasty and focused in a way that the launch strips, designed to create enduring set-ups and episodic templates, couldn’t be. Mills is showing other writers what a short-run 2000AD story could achieve, an example nobody followed as well for years.

Frank Hart’s suicidal anti-hero is also emblematic of the darkening of 2000AD over the course of 1978, that feeling of a group of young creators continuing to push hard (recklessly hard, in some cases) against the traces of conventional heroism in the early Progs. Bill Savage got a happy ending, but the Harlem Heroes and MACH 1 were not long for this world, and Dare was pistol-whipping his men and facing mutiny. A lot of the bumpiness of this phase of 2000AD comes from a sense that the Prog was trying to find a goldilocks level of cynicism – high enough to give creators freedom and still be a vivid, shocking alternative to any other comic, but not so high that it was impossible to run viable, ongoing strips with characters readers actually liked. The Visible Man is a remarkable strip, angry to the point of nihilism – the most “punk” 2000AD ever got, you might say. But like Frank Hart himself, it’s a freak, and 2000AD would need to define its own kind of norms.

HOW TO READ IT: More than a dozen of 2000AD’s short-run strips, mostly from its first decade, are included in Rebellion’s SCI FI THRILLERS collection. The Visible Man is one of them.

RECOMMENDED?: Yes. It’s one of the best early 2000AD shorts; intense, melodramatic and not really like anything else from the 70s Progs.

NEXT PROG: Ancient aliens, giant robots and a new ice age – the stakes are high in 2000AD’s first ever writer/artist strip, Colony Earth, but is the quality? (Spoiler: No.)