To Live A Life Of Freedom, Machos Take A Stand: COLONY EARTH!

This is an entry in Discourse 2000, my year-by-year, story-by-story analysis of 2000AD strips. Contains spoilers for Colony Earth!

Which Thrill? A hard-bitten Naval Commander battles an alien invasion, almost single-handedly. If that doesn’t narrow it down, it’s the strip’s fault not mine.

Among the scattering of short-run 2000AD stories in the first half of 1978, Colony Earth! feels especially runty. Unlike Death Planet or Ant Wars, it never gets a cover. Unlike The Visible Man, it’s not by one of the big 2000AD writers and was never considered as a launch strip. A 10-part story about a planned invasion by the alien “gnomes”, it’s remembered as a space-filling failure, in the unlikely event it’s remembered at all.

It would be nice to be able to revise the critics’ verdict on Colony Earth and put a bit of shine on a hidden gem, but unfortunately the story deserves its poor rep. The general vibe is one of a middleweight boys’ paper story trying hard to fit the 2000AD style and failing, like a nice kid who suddenly decides he needs to swear. Why is a Commander in the British Navy suddenly talking like Bill Savage? Because, I’d guess, someone – whether writer/artist Jim Watson or one of the editorial staff – is trying to punch up a flat script.

You can see this from the very first page, with a fishing trawler hauling in the nets on the North Sea. “But you’ve pulled out MORE than cod, fisherman!” screams the caption, in what could be a parody of the breathless narration of Invasion! or MACH 1. The scene as illustrated is one dozens of movies and TV episodes might have gone with as an introduction, the equivalent of the modern ‘cold open’ with an ominous, mysterious vignette before we cut to our main cast. But the 2000AD style demands more immediate thrills, even if the script is begging for something slower paced.

What’s telling about this that, just one year in, there is a 2000AD style, and quite a rigid one. The 2000AD editors know what they want Colony Earth to feel like – a story that grabs you by the neck from page one and doesn’t let go. Everything we’ve seen in the comic before has worked on that principle, after all. But Colony Earth is the first example of a story which is actually worse for trying to follow that lead. It’s not just the narration. The central characters – Naval Intelligence Captain Hunter and peacenik Professor Vandenburg – feel like a pastiche of the familiar Action combo of the hard-as-nails hero and his ineffective by-the-book sidekick, with the twist that both act like idiots.

This is a shame, because the most interesting thing Colony Earth does – and it’s a trick later short-run stories would sometimes use more successfully – is constantly raise the stakes over its first few episodes. A mystery on board a fishing trawler becomes a hunt for a missing nuclear sub. The hunt for the sub becomes an investigation of an ancient alien site. The investigation of the site turns into an attempt by aliens to geo-engineer earth back to the ice age. The shift in perspective is dizzying, or at least it should be, but by trying for all out thrill-power from panel one any sense of a building mystery is lost. 

That might not be a problem if the drive to make Colony Earth more exciting worked. But squeezing the story into a 2000AD style isn’t the worst of its issues. Watson also has too much going on in his own plot, falling back on exposition and heavy use of narrative captions, so it often feels like you’re reading an outline of a story, not the story itself. His pacing is unwieldy – episode one ends with the revelation that a dredged up vessel “isn’t designed for water – it’s designed for SPACE”. Good cliffhanger! But the episode actually ends with the hero saying no, it can’t be that, deflating any momentum the reveal creates. Watson is also an artist whose strengths are individual action and facial expression – he can set a scene effectively but there’s not a strong sense of place even when the locations are as thrillingly exotic as anything we saw in MACH 1.

In the second half of Colony Earth the relentless expansion of scope dies down, and the story focuses on an attack on the aliens’ mothership, which is draining Earth’s seas and expanding its poles from orbit. In classic 2000AD style, Hunter takes this job on himself after finding Cape Canaveral destroyed: he grabs the first guy he can find wandering around in an astronaut’s gear and gets him to pilot the captured alien craft, taking his academic chum along for the ride too. Despite the astronaut getting captured, and the Professor wasting time on such un-thrill-powered activities as negotiation and compromise, Hunter’s two-fisted pluck is more than a match for the extremely poorly prepared aliens. (In fairness, they have arrived back in the solar system expecting to find Ice Age tribes). Hunter destroys the mothership, noting after this potential genocide that he hopes the next aliens humanity meets are friendly.

Colony Earth is a two-fisted alien invasion yarn that might have run as a scientific romance in the 1910s, except it’s gussied up to 2000AD standards with a short-tempered action hero. Watson hustles the story from point to point with a minimum of sense and a maximum of contrivance – Earth is saved ultimately because the invading “gnomes” have one killer robot which they operate by a hand-held remote control. When the alien operator gets socked in the jaw and drops it, the tide dramatically turns.

But so what if the story is held together by string and silly putty, you might say? Very little in the early years of 2000AD can stand up to the full glare of plot hole examination. The thrill’s the thing. And yet the failure of Colony Earth lets us come up with a working hypothesis on when “not making sense” matters or doesn’t. The twist that the killer robot can’t handle stairs makes no sense – the aliens who built the ancient temple (with stairs) also built the robot. But the reason that matters is because it makes the robot seem significantly less cool and dangerous. A plot hole is forgivable if it increases thrill-power: the fumblings of Colony Earth drain it from the strip.

Bar a few Kevin O’Neill strips, Colony Earth the first time in 2000AD we’ve seen a writer/artist take on a story, and it’s bizarre that it’s the most stilted and awkwardly told of anything we’ve yet read. Watson undercuts his story in the telling of it, losing momentum every time he wraps up a scene with a laborious transition, or softens the tension of a cliffhanger by giving Hunter the last word. His art can be effective – the storm-lashed trawler makes an atmospheric and effective opening, and there’s a shadowy urgency to most of the action which works well. But Jim Watson is constantly being undermined by Jim Watson and his perfunctory pacing and thudding dialogue.

In the wider scheme of 2000AD, Colony Earth is the comic attempting a kind of science fiction it hadn’t really tried yet – a 50s B-Movie catastrophe story along the lines of The Day The Earth Stood Still (“Charley”, the mute robot in Colony Earth, is a fairly obvious analogue for that film’s Gort, another lone, powerful weapon turned on our planet by alien forces). If you come to it with that hokey, drive-thru, vibe in mind the story works, not well, but perhaps a little better. It also explains why readers found it old fashioned, of course, with persistent later suspicions that the strip had been created for and mothballed by some earlier comic and dug out of storage when Gosnell felt the content pinch.

That particular criticism feels unfair – if Colony Earth is old-fashioned, it’s because it’s a more traditional kind of SF story. Jim Watson, after all, was an established artist but not outdated – he was getting work for other IPC titles well into the 80s, with stories for Scream! and Battle. His only previous science fiction credits, though, hailed from an earlier era, with some lovely work for 60s weekly TV21, very much in what looks like a post-Eagle space adventure style. So it’s not too surprising that his story for an SF adventure comic looks a little rusty.

Doing a 50s B-Movie story is a solid move for 2000AD at this point too – as we talked about with Dan Dare, it’s a science fiction comic which is still finding out which of the many modes of SF work well for it. Every 2000AD story in 1978 is answering that question in a different way, even if a lot of those answers turn out not to be good. The problem Colony Earth has isn’t that it’s a B-Movie sci-fi epic on a 10-week timetable. The problem is that it doesn’t do a great job of being a B-Movie, because most B-Movies were about something.

The classic B-Movies of the 1950s and 1960s became classics not just because they were thrilling and original but because their themes touched the concerns of the time – the Cold War, the bomb, the fear of subversion or authoritatian takeover. 2000AD’s early line-up of stories followed suit: even the grand guignol absurdity of Shako is also a parable of the way international politics and industry intrudes on the natural world (and in that story pays the bloody price). Colony Earth has the iconography of the drive-in sci-fi feature – robots, spacemen and aliens, and even a couple of newer tropes like the “ancient astronauts” of Erich Von Daniken (A book by Richard Mooney, Colony Earth, was published in 1974: “STARTS WHERE DANIKEN LEFT OFF”, cries the cover). And if you want to really stretch things it has a title that hints at questions of “who decides ownership of a place?” which might have some kind of real world resonance. 

Maybe they would in someone else’s story. But Colony Earth isn’t arranging any of these pieces into a meaningful pattern. Not only is there nothing thematically interesting in the threat of the “gnomes”, the story actively rejects the idea of co-operation or dialogue. Sometimes the alien scum are just alien scum who need to get shot in the back, apparently.

It’s worth saying that this conception of the evil enemy who can be safely slaughtered is something 2000AD is happy to embrace for several years to come. But when the idea shows up across the prog’s first decade or so, usually in future war stories with the Sovs and the Norts and the Krool, it’s because 2000AD has usually preferred to monsterise the goodies rather than humanise the baddies, to put a far more cynical spotlight onto the side our heroes are on. The two-dimensional storytelling of Colony Earth only approaches that complexity by accident, as the gnomes are so feeble an enemy that I feel a bit sorry for them.  

Colony Earth is a dead end for 2000AD, but like most of 1978’s dead ends it was worth exploring, if only as a proof of concept for what 2000AD shouldn’t be doing. The truth is that while Colony Earth wouldn’t have been a highlight of any comic, it might have passed muster in Tiger or Valiant or one of 2000AD’s other rivals. It stands out as awful in this context because 2000AD had already hit an unusual level of consistency and quality. This was something to be proud of for the editorial team, but also a curse: Colony Earth proved that you couldn’t simply port in other writers and expect a 2000AD-standard strip out of them. The pressure on the scripters who could hit the standard was only becoming more intense.

HOW TO READ IT: Like The Visible Man, it’s reprinted in the grab-bag collection SCI FI THRILLERS.

RECOMMENDED?: No, though it’s not a difficult or painful read. It’s just very mediocre.

NEXT PROG: Once he was 2000AD’s most popular strip, but how the mighty fall. We return to the super-spy world of MACH 1 to look at John Probe’s final missions, and also talk about his successor, the extremely strange British Hulk story MACH Zero.