How The Darkness Doubled: INFERNO

This is the final entry in Season 1 of Discourse 2000, a story-by-story look at 2000AD. Contains spoilers!

WHICH THRILL? The surviving cast of Harlem Heroes return, forming a team to compete in the new, even more violent sport of Inferno.

THE STORY OF A VIOLENT COMIC

Action, 2000AD’s notorious predecessor, still existed for the bulk of 1977, a meek remnant drifting on the edge of the IPC Youth Group like the lobotomised Alex in A Clockwork Orange. The characters were the same; their exploits sadly different: Hook Jaw, scourge of the deep, was reduced to discreetly conducting his grisly feasts behind rocks. Towards the end of the year, Action was put out of its misery, a baleful reminder of what happened when violence and transgression crossed the lines.

But what lines? Discussions of violence in early 2000AD took place in Action’s shadow, but violence in comics was not a monolith. Treating it as one is what the comic’s enemies did, part of a wave of violence on screen, on paper, on the streets, a symptom of a society sliding nearer a precipice. But much comic violence was ignored. For all the grit and body count of Battle Picture Weekly, war comics rarely drew the sort of criticism that led to Action’s dilution. The bullying and psychological torment meted out to some unfortunate heroines of IPC girls’ titles escaped official notice. And even gruesome violence in media could be deployed as a legitimate tactic if the aim was educational: 1977 also saw the release of the controversial Finishing Line, a British Transport Films production that has a weird fantasy-sports plot about competitive games being held on a railway line, with predictable and bloody consequences – all shown on screen.

So each act of violence in 2000AD’s pages is an answer to a set of questions. Who gets to be violent? Who has violence done to them? What sort of violence, and how does the comic frame it?

Science Fiction, as Mills, Sanders, Gosnell et al well knew, was a perfect genre for legitimate violence. We’ve seen how beasts and monsters are sanctioned perpetrators of violence, and how robots and aliens are respectable victims. We’ve also seen how an authoritarian star, Dredd, can dole out remarkable levels of brutality. But that still left several strips which relied on human-on-human violence for thrills – MACH 1, Invasion! and the future sports stories. And these were the ones which continually needed changing and correcting as the comic tried to avoid the invisible tripwires set around it.

The comic’s violence had a set of stakeholders too – the writers and artists; the editorial staff, who set the broad tone on acceptability; the art and production staff, including the “bodgers” whose job it was to alter or white out the most egregious examples. Then there were the immediate management like John Sanders, who tended to be in the firing line when the media, or the likes of the Responsible Society pressure group, came calling. There were the rest of the IPC magazines department, mostly of a more traditional bent, whose editors – something all the 2000AD mainstays agree on – broadly resented the upstart Youth Group titles. Upper management, keen to avoid scandal. Parents. Campaigners. 

And somewhere in there, the readers themselves. We know that from the beginning, not all 2000AD readers were kids. We also know that the launch was aiming for a broader range of young readers than the core market of 8-10 year old boys – Mills and Gosnell were pissed off that the best the promotions department could come up with for the cover-mount free gift was a shitty plastic frisbee, which felt too young. Even so, the median reader was certainly a young boy.

And this can be a hard thing to recapture when you’re thinking about early 2000AD. There’s a temptation to take Action, and the more hair-raising elements of 2000AD, and the stories of what got censored, and look at those things from the perspective of what 2000AD becomes in a few years’ time, a comic with a far higher level of wit and narrative sophistication while still being very clearly pitched at kids. It becomes easy to think, well, Action and early 2000AD are necessary steps to get to prime 2000AD, and the forces which tried (successfully in Action’s case) to censor and dilute them could have smothered a British comics renaissance in its crib.

There’s a lot of truth in this, but the temptation of hindsight misses the delicacy of the actual situation. What everyone working on the titles seems to have been aware of – particularly the more experienced hands like Mills – is that when you’re being read by 8 year old boys you really are making difficult choices, and it’s not just a case of the bold creators against the censorious suits. There’s a sweet spot where the comic is tough and exciting and boundary-pushing enough to be making waves and picking up sales, but on the other side of that are things nobody was ever likely to get away with. The internal reaction to the notorious “Kids Rule OK” Action cover – one of the most high-impact, brutal, famous pieces of 70s UK comics art – was closer to “oh shit” than “hell yeah”. It’s a classic, but it’s a classic that always risked killing the comic off.

Taking risks and pushing the edges of the acceptable is what gets you talked about and admired. Crossing those edges is what makes you a management headache. Which brings us, finally, to Inferno, where the question of violence which has haunted 2000AD since before its launch becomes critical.

GAMES WITHOUT FRONTIERS

The basic idea of Inferno is simple: it’s the sequel to Harlem Heroes, still written by veteran Tom Tully, but now drawn by Massimo Belardinelli, in a straight artist swap with Dan Dare. Aeroball has gone out of fashion, replaced by a newer, more violent sport called Inferno, which the surviving characters have to adopt after a crooked gambling syndicate ruins their good name. So on one level Inferno is in the same mode as its predecessor – the familiar plots of the sports strip grafted onto an invented, futuristic competition.

But when you actually read it Inferno is considerably more radical. In Harlem Heroes, you could get the idea of Aeroball from the first Dave Gibbons’ splash page. But Inferno, the sport, is deliberately incomprehensible – the entire opening sequence is about the Heroes characters not knowing what the rules are, and the reader sharing their total bafflement at some kind of ultraviolent offside rule. “The only way a biker can score is to bounce the ball off an airman who’s inside his OWN score-semi! You should know that!” yells a character at poor Giant.

The inclusion of bikes reminds us not just of Rollerball – the ur-text for all future sports stories at this point – but of Action’s Death Game 1999, which is much closer to Inferno than it was to Harlem Heroes, with the brutality, chaos and corruption of the game more central to the story than any kind of sporting incident. But even Death Game 1999 had a set up readers could intuitively grasp – “spinball”, its future sport, takes place on a gigantic pinball table. However minor, it’s a concession to reality that Inferno won’t match.

The Heroes get the hang of things, though and the first Inferno story is a reprise of familiar Harlem Heroes territory – our guys’ skill and precision beating out cruder opponents. But the story doesn’t pause to explain the game to the reader, because the specifics of Inferno are even less the point than the rules of Aeroball were in the first strip. Inferno involves some players in the sky, others on bikes with a stuntman’s wall of death ringing the arena, and one ‘roided-out goalkeeper with a massive club (the goal is the “Cave”; the goalie is therefore the “Cave-Man”, a name Belardinelli needs no prompting to take literally).

The diversity of roles solves one of the bigger Harlem Heroes problems – the characters had broadly similar looks and personalities. Tully gets to shake things up a little with team composition, and players like Cave-Man Moody Bloo and preening stunt biker Regal Eegle add a bit of extra characterisation, even if its just a shift from zero dimensions to one. But the tactics this complex set-up might imply are of no interest to creators or readers – the point of the combination is to create opportunities for mayhem. It’s a sports comic which takes the hidden truth about sports comics – the sport isn’t really the point – and makes it absolutely explicit. Within a handful of episodes the action leaves the Inferno pitch entirely and the characters are battling their way through a corrupt Casino, which does the classic “Danger Room” thing of switching between holographic and real threats at the touch of a villain’s button. 

So if Inferno is a sports comic that isn’t about sport, what is it about? Easy: violence and weirdness. The cynical genius of Inferno is that the reason for the strip, and the in-story premise, and the reader’s response to the story, are all perfectly aligned. Inferno in fact takes the villain’s motivation from Harlem Heroes – what people want is mayhem, not skill – and says, OK, the bad guy was actually completely right in his analysis, and the Harlem Heroes were wrong. So it’s a story about an ultra-violent future sport replacing less violent versions, which is itself replacing a less violent story about a less violent version, presumably in the hopes that readers will respond to it better.

This means that Inferno is the clearest example yet of something which becomes a bit of a signature move for 2000AD: a strip where the narrative drive, the genre and the premise of the story are not aligned with the protagonists. We saw this in Flesh, which sets up a story where Joe Bronkowski and Earl Reagan are the heroes and actually tells one in which the lead character is Old One Eye and the story is aligned with her goals and perspective. But it’s even clearer in Inferno, which puts the lead characters from a sports strip, with sports-strip goals – rise up the league and clear their name – into what is ultimately a story centred on violence and crime.

And the Harlem Heroes characters, it turns out, cannot survive in such a story. Their essential decency and positive motivation are overwhelmed by the violence of the narrative they’ve found themselves in. If Inferno is remembered – beyond for almost getting 2000AD cancelled, of which more in a moment – it’s remembered for its ending, a massacre of every single lead character except for Giant himself and for Cindy, the team’s one woman player, who got away with a mere maiming. It’s possible that the only reason even Giant survives this slaughter is that he’s previously appeared as an old man in a Judge Dredd strip – this is the phase of the comic where the editors are still toying with a shared 2000AD universe.

What’s more important than the fact of the massacre is the way it’s told. There was a similar deck-clearing at the end of the Harlem Heroes strip, with “Hairy” and Conrad King meeting their end on the pitch. But the cast of Inferno are even denied the dignity of on-panel deaths – two of them are killed off in a text box with only the saddened face of Tharg to mark their passing. The strip ends with the faceless head of the gambling syndicate making it clear: Giant has lost everything because he messed with organised crime, and there will be no victory or vengeance. It is a savagely bleak conclusion to over a years’ worth of stories. There’s only one message the reader can take away from Inferno, from beginning to end: the Harlem Heroes were fools and their ideals were worthless.

Ending a 2000AD strip by wiping out the cast is a trick arguably lifted from its success in Battle, where a single 1977 issue saw no less than three sets of protagonists bite the dust. In any case, by this time it was nothing new. Old One Eye and Shako “died well”, their human adversaries largely didn’t, but all cards in those stories were marked from the beginning. MACH 1, whose ending we’ll cover in the 1978 posts, is more of a shock, but it’s still built to. But little about the first half of Inferno suggests the grimness of its final episodes. So what’s going on here?

LEAVING IT ALL ON THE PITCH

To get a handle on Inferno it’s worth looking harder at its creative team. Tom Tully was a seasoned sports comic pro even by this stage, but he was also not a stranger to controversy – he wrote the “bottling” scene in Look Out For Lefty which helped doom Action. His professionalism didn’t mean a safe or placid approach to storytelling; instead he worked in the old spirit of the blood and thunder boys’ papers and penny dreadfuls. You spent your first page recapping and resolving the last cliffhanger, and your last one introducing a new one. In between you got from A to B with plenty of incident. If the editors wanted laughs, they got laughs. If they wanted mayhem, they could have that too.

This is not a system that rewards strong long-term plotting, let alone thematic development. But it is a system which generates stories that can be extended to indefinite length, especially given a reliable artist. Inferno could go on as long as it was popular, but when its popularity faltered – or when, as may well have happened, it fell foul of management – Tully’s way of working meant the axe could fall on the strip very quickly.

As for the type of story Tully was telling, Inferno feels to me clearly written with its artist in mind. Even compared to the other stories in early 2000AD, there’s a schlockiness to Inferno, a kind of grindhouse gusto, which gets the most out of Massimo Belardinelli. For around 30 of its 40 episodes Inferno is an entertaining romp apparently built around “shit Belardinelli enjoys drawing”. There’s a caveman guy, a bunch of cyborg freaks, biker dudes, a lot of sexy robot women, insanely distorted and unlikely robots and vehicles, and occasional breathtaking visions of the Inferno ‘Firebowl’ stadiums, set in gothically decayed hellscapes of cities which bring home the absolute degeneration of the society the strip is set in. (As well as a bitchin’ name for a future sport, the title is a classical reference).

Belardinelli is having a great, mad, time until close to the final episode, and as with Dan Dare his work alone makes a case for the value of Inferno. It’s wildly imaginative and also tremendously violent – Kevin O’Neill, art editor at this point, remembered repeatedly having to point out the management that it’s ‘only’ robots and cyborgs taking the brunt of the limb-shredding, eye-popping, skull-busting punishment, as Belardinelli draws Inferno like a horror comic more than a sports one. It makes the strip a strange combination of total visual excess masking efficient, but predictable plotting. But either Tully’s ideas for the strip start to flag or the editors push him in the wrong direction. Whichever it is, he brings back Harlem Heroes antagonist Artie Gruber, the point at which Inferno starts to go off the rails.

It’s not that Gruber is a bad villain – he was the most charismatic part of the Harlem Heroes strip, an early indicator that the story, and the comic it appeared in, were more on the side of violence than the plot implied. But Tully has nothing new to do with him – literally, as the Gruber story in Inferno entirely retreads the Harlem Heroes story where Gruber joins the opposing team in disguise. But this time it doesn’t work, mostly because it pushes the action of the story onto the Inferno playing field and asks Belardinelli to communicate what’s actually happening in the match. Which he can’t do, first because even at this stage the story has given us no idea of the actual shape of an Inferno game (why should it? It’s never mattered) and second because the complex, well-choreographed storytelling Dave Gibbons specialised in is Belardinelli’s weakest suit. (Made up for by the gross-out magnificence of his other Gruber scenes, though.)

But the main thing about the second Gruber storyline is that it’s the point where Inferno almost gets 2000AD cancelled.

FINAL WHISTLE

In the Shako entry, I wrote that the violence in Action could transfer to 2000AD fairly easily – switch around the perpetrators and victims to be aliens and cyborgs and dinosaurs, and you could get away with plentiful varieties of murder. What didn’t transfer was the earlier comic’s aggressive cheek. But there was one type of violence guaranteed to bring on trouble – realistic violence, acts readers could in theory imitate. MACH 1 is regularly interrupted by captions telling readers that “only a dum-dum” would imitate John Probe’s brutal activities, and even so the strip was constantly being censored and nastier incidents whited out. 

The exact lines IPC management drew around which actions needed these warnings seem to have been highly inconsistent, not to say stupid. There’s a story in Thrill-Power Overload about a Youth Group editor needing to be talked down after they objected to a Judge being pickled alive in vinegar – kids might, they insisted, climb inside any giant pickling jars they might have at home. But however idiotic the specific examples, the basic point was an article of faith in late 70s media: that kids routinely imitated incidents from TV shows and comics as part of their imaginative play. So the threat of imitation was the trump card anti-violence and pro-censorship campaigners would play when they targeted childrens’ media. When Mary Whitehouse successfully came for Doctor Who, it was over a cliffhanger in which the villain held the Doctor’s head under water – exactly the thing, she said, children would try out for themselves.

And wherever the lines were drawn, a cliffhanger of a cackling Gruber pouring gasoline over Giant and standing over him with a lit match was never going to be on the right side. Coming to this incident reading Inferno now is a stomach-turning moment, as a white villain threatening to torch a Black character alive has an aura of lynchings and racist murders in the real world, though there’s no evidence anyone – creators or management – saw this as a factor at the time. Even so, this is 2000AD’s “Kids Rule OK” moment, the point which might have tipped management against it and killed its long-term hopes of survival.

Accounts of the incident vary – everyone involved agrees John Sanders went ballistic, but there’s confusion as to whether the Gruber cliffhanger, or the body count at the end of Inferno caused the trouble. What all stories agree on is the existential risk to 2000AD, and the way the editorial side of the comic was unusually chaotic during this pivotal moment. Gosnell, the titular editor, had been spending most of his time dealing with Star Lord, the in-house rival to 2000AD that Sanders had ordered him to develop in haste while still doing his 2000AD job. It was an impossible workload, and Gosnell left Nick Landau and Kevin O’Neill in charge of the Prog, both of whom were less cautious and keener to push boundaries.

So the Inferno crisis came along at the riskiest possible time for 2000AD – a moment when a less turbulent and controversial comic was ready and waiting to absorb it. Of course, that’s not what happened: Sanders gambled, as he tells it, on 2000AD being the stronger brand, and Star Lord was the victim of the merger. The lead-up to, and consequences of that decision, will be major themes in the 1978 posts.

But even though the strip itself was bundled quickly to its bloody cancellation, the Inferno incident is a watershed moment for 2000AD, and for the nascent comic’s relationship with violence. If you squint, you can see Inferno as a disapproving commentary on violence in media – Giant and company choose to go with the tide and embrace the violence, and it destroys them. But this is a generous reading of a strip whose basic instincts are to keep the plot rolling in a brutal and exciting way and let Belardinelli go for the visual jugular, a job it did with too much gusto for IPC management. 

History had almost repeated itself. 2000AD had taken the same risks that killed Action, IPC management had clamped down, and both sides ultimately stepped back. 2000AD survived, and would remain a violent comic, often in ways which would make the average Inferno episode look fairly tame. But it’s many years until the Prog risks a story in which the violence is the heart and the point of the strip in the way it was for Inferno. 

So one of the signature moves of 2000AD’s first year – using SF as a cover for greater and greater mayhem – reaches a limit point. The comic would need to find other ways – ultimately more sophisticated ones – to excite its readers. The more darkly comic tones of Shako and Judge Dredd already suggested one route. But the editors also had another idea. How about if a weekly science fiction comic tried a bit of, you know, science fiction?

HOW TO READ IT: Inferno is reprinted in The Complete Harlem Heroes, alongside the original strip.

RECOMMENDED?: It’s unfocused and drags in places, it’s cynically violent, and the ending is shoddily executed, but it’s also Belardinelli unleashed in a way he wasn’t even on Dan Dare, and most episodes have at least something really eye-boggling if you like his style.

NEXT PROG: There may well be an interlude post (or more than one) but that’s the end of Season 1 – I hope you’ve enjoyed it! The main series of Discourse 2000 will return when I’ve written the 1978 posts. Dredd stars in two action epics! 2000AD gets its first (human) female lead! Dan Dare gets involved in a “war” in the “stars”! The fans move in! Robots everywhere! And after a year when 2000AD had the market to itself, serious rivals emerge…