Stay Glued To Your TV Set: HARLEM HEROES

A post in the Discourse 2000 series, covering 2000AD story-by-story. Will include spoilers!

WHICH THRILL? Aeroball is a jet-pack fuelled airborne contact sport and Harlem Heroes are the best team in the world. When most of the squad is killed in a ‘freak accident’, they must rebuild.

FORMULA ONE

Tom Tully knew sports comics backwards, and maybe that was the problem. Tully had been writing sports stories for over a decade, and the set-up of Harlem Heroes – a lashed-together group of lads who must learn to work together as a team to lift the title – was already a tried-and-trusted sports comic formula. But the fact it’s a formula isn’t quite the issue, as all the strips had formulaic elements – no episode of Flesh was going to pass without someone getting eaten by a dinosaur. The problem is the familiarity of those elements. By the third episode, reckless rookie Zack almost costs the Heroes a match, before getting chewed out by the captain then coming back on to save the game. If you’ve read many IPC sports stories before, you’ve read that one. To be honest, if you’ve read one IPC sports story before, you’ve read that one.

Every beat in Harlem Heroes is one the readers have seen before, and it makes it obvious that what you’re getting here is a conventional sports strip with SF trimmings. Some of the trimmings are ingenious, for sure. The standard-issue ‘opponents who play dirty’ are Soviet team the Siberian Wolves, and they get away with it simply because they have so many bodies in reserve they can do extremely dangerous things, so it’s also a way of showing off the many ways players of jetpack-driven future sport aeroball risk their lives. But nothing about the futuristic setting changes the actual plot of the story: this could be any team sport, in any era, at any level.

This is a problem for 2000AD. The comic’s promise to readers isn’t just solid stories, which Tom Tully is a master at delivering. It’s stories that show the reader things they’ve never seen before. If it’s obvious the SF elements in a strip like Harlem Heroes are decals on a very familiar vehicle, then it risks making all the SF elements in all the strips feel a little more cosmetic. Week on week, Harlem Heroes’ route one tactics are very effective – Tully is supremely efficient at resolving a cliffhanger and moving the story along to the next one. But it has little of the wildness and unpredictability that make the better strips sing. 

What it does have, thank goodness, is Dave Gibbons. We saw Gibbons briefly on Dan Dare – by drawing the opening Heroes episodes he’s the first British artist to get regular work on the comic, though he only got on board after seeing his friend Mike McMahon working on a Judge Dredd strip. His background was in fanzines and underground comics, with his first prominent work appearing in 1971’s The Trials Of Nasty Tales, a benefit dramatisation of the unsuccessful obscenity prosecution of the Nasty Tales underground title. He only draws two pages of it, but they’re confident, dramatic and highly recognisable as Gibbons.

Gibbons’ contemporaries were impressed by his speed as well as his quality, and it made him a good fit for the weekly grind of 2000AD. On Harlem Heroes he’s not yet great at differentiating characters, a problem in a strip where most of the cast wear the same costume and where the writer is only interested in the broadest-stroke characterisation, but luckily he can fit a name into most panels. And his style is immediately attractive – like early collaborator Brian Bolland he has a clear, dark line with strong use of shading, which works extremely well on a comic printed on low-grade “bog paper”.

He’s also a great choice for a strip where a good percentage of the action happens in mid-air. The first image in Harlem Heroes – a jetpack-enhanced shoulder charge – tells you almost everything you need to know about the invented sport of Aeroball, and it works because Gibbons’ figures have weight and momentum without having the kind of exaggerated motion you see in American comics. Gibbons, unlike some of his fellow 2000AD creators, actually liked superheroes, and designed the Heroes’ uniforms using Marvel and DC characters as an inspiration. Superhero fights sometimes require a kind of aerial ballet, and Gibbons draws on them, but tempered to the more down-to-earth action of a British sports strip. To the extent aeroball works on the page at all, it’s down to Gibbons’ solid judgment about how dramatic and unlikely an athlete’s airborne movement can be.

Gibbons’ other early strength is machinery and architecture. Tom Tully may sprinkle his production-line plots with futuristic settings and technological add-ons, but it’s Gibbons who gives the sporting world of 2050 weight. Everything from the transatlantic tunnel and the Heroes’ sleek tourbus, to the jetpacks and electrified barriers in the aeroball arena is given a level of vivid detail: when a player rams the ball into one of the holes in the cuboid scoring block, you can almost hear it clank and shudder. 

Thanks to Gibbons, readers could grasp the point of aeroball quickly, and Harlem Heroes mostly avoids the first pitfall of invented sports – the plot twist based around an entirely unrevealed rule (by the time Tully does trot this out, with a Japanese side who play using samurai swords, the strip is heading for its end anyway). But it still hits the second pitfall, which is that even if the sport makes sense, it’s extremely hard to care about.

IT’S A FUNNY OLD GAME

Since 2000AD keeps trying future sports stories, and since almost none of them are creative highlights or big reader hits, it’s worth digging into this a bit. What is it about future sports that makes it such a dud story category? (There are stories which successfully use sporting elements, like John Wagner’s great love of using commentators as a comic counterpoint to the action in several Judge Dredd episodes; I’m talking here about stories like Harlem Heroes or Mean Arena, where sport is the central organising idea of the strip)

The first thing to point out is that the sport part isn’t the problem. Sports are an absolute gift to episodic comic writers, as they come pre-packed with a narrative that has its own rhythms, peaks and lulls, all immediately recognisable to fans and readers. Sport was a vital category in British comics, one of the story types which worked across decades of publishing and was popular enough to sustain dedicated comics. These included IPC’s Roy Of The Rovers, on which Tully was lead writer for three decades, and which entered the language as shorthand for unlikely on-pitch feats. In Japan, meanwhile, sports comics achieved artistic peaks even Roy couldn’t match, artists using the longer episodes of manga to zero in on the intense psychology and moment-by-moment twists and reversals in sporting battles.

For all the cup-winning heroics associated with Roy Of The Rovers, one reason sports serials work is that they’re one of the few story types to allow some genuine uncertainty into the mix. Most comics heroes are not going to lose often, if at all, particularly if their adventures have life-or-death stakes. But loss is part of sport, an outcome as useful to the writer’s mix as victory. In the revived Eagle in 1982, after dragging their comprehensive school team from apathetic uselessness to the brink of cup triumph, the heroes of Thunderbolt And Smokey fail in the final: their happy ending (written by Tully) is to have persuaded their curmudgeonly teacher that sport is worth investing in.

In fact, one of the surprising things about a successful sports story is often how little sport there is in it. If, like me, you only knew Tom Tully from his contributions to 2000AD, a player with impressive workrate but little flair, it’s well worth reading his contribution to Action, Look Out For Lefty, one of the stories which landed that comic in trouble. A strip about a working-class talent with a dynamite left foot, Lefty keeps on-pitch action low compared to the knockabout Steptoe And Son style comedy of Lefty’s relationship with his feckless, alcoholic grandad, whose schemes and tribulations constantly hold the kid back. On the pitch are the usual triumphs and disasters of the sports story, but they’re framed with surreal and unpredictable antics – like a several episode plot in which Lefty is saddled with a cartful of knock-off garden gnomes – which make the story much funnier and more vivid than anything Tully produced for the Prog.

So sports stories work. But they work because their readers know the sport, probably watch and maybe play the sport, and because the rhythms of the sporting calendar (the match, the cup, the season) create a commonly understood framework for drama. The writer doesn’t need to explain the rules, the competitions, or the sporting goals of their characters, and that gives them more space to do other things – create real uncertainty around the outcomes, explore their characters’ psychology and emotions, and build up off-field drama and comedy to create stakes outside the matches.

With future sport, most of those dramatic advantages vanish. With no base of shared knowledge, the writer has to do more expository work to establish what the stakes are in a particular match, how badly the odds are stacked against the main characters, and, in a genre where cheating and unfair advantage is a motor for drama, how those things even happen. In Harlem Heroes, one result of this is that the Heroes sometimes look like absolute idiots, the most successful aeroball team in the world regularly blindsided by a complete lack of opposition research, or even awareness of regional rules, as these are things Tully prefers to explain as the match gets underway.

The other problem with future sport stories, and perhaps especially the ones in 2000AD, is that three ideas dominate creators’ conceptions of what the future of sport is going to be like. It will be faster, it will be more mechanised, and most importantly it will be more violent. The source for these ideas – and for Harlem Heroes, Action’s Death Game 1999, and ultimately every other dystopian sports strip – is 1975’s Rollerball, a modest box office success and one of the movies which persuaded Kelvin Gosnell that an SF comic was worth pitching to IPC in the first place.

The core elements of Rollerball – a completely corrupt sporting infrastructure overseeing an ultra-violent sport with a high casualty rate – are the backbone of Harlem Heroes too. The point of Rollerball, though, was not to create an exciting future sport – director/producer Norman Jewison was apparently horrified when investors asked to set up real life rollerball leagues. Instead it was born from Jewison’s (and writer William Harrison’s) disgust with the brutality of existing sports and the inhumane and anti-individual ethos of multinational corporations. Such high-minded motivations did not weather the trip across mediums well.

But whether for satirical reasons or not, Rollerball and its derivatives agree that future sport will be bloodthirsty. This isn’t an extrapolation from sporting trends so much as a bet on societal ones – entertainment of all sorts will become inexorably more violent. It’s the same bet John Sanders is making when he looks outside the generally staid IPC establishment and brings in Pat Mills to create more brutal, up-to-date comics. 2000AD is on the side of violence in a way more obviously satirical or dystopian treatments aren’t. This is eventually going to create not just moral but existential issues for the comic, but the ambiguity this introduces is also a reason that the actually satirical elements in 2000AD can work so well.

The problem is that if the story is framed so that the violence is the point of the strip, the thing which differentiates fictional sport from real sport, and the stakes for the characters become life and death, the weight of the violence is going to overwhelm all other story elements. Someone trying to murder team captain Giant on the pitch is more exciting than either Giant trying to score a goal or whatever’s going down at home. 

So in any future sport strip you’d expect the violent parts to get more attention than the sports parts, and the emphasis to change accordingly, becoming more and more of a Battle Royale set-up. All future sport stories end up, in fact, mirroring the distant past of spectator sports – the duels and chariot races of the Colosseum.

SQUEAKY BUM TIME

This is exactly what happens in Harlem Heroes, where the strip runs for 27 episodes, then goes on a two-month break before coming back as the even more violent and deadly Inferno. But you can also see it in the way the secondary plot of the series – the off-field stakes Tully creates – gradually takes over the main, sporting plot. This background story involves the Heroes trying to work out who caused the accident which wiped half the team out in episode one (and left one survivor a brain in a jar). 

This is not a tough case for the reader to crack. Aside from the team, and cyborg ex-player Artie Gruber who is trying to kill them on behalf of their mystery enemy, there is only one other recurring character in the strip: the Heroes’ wealthy backer, media mogul Ulysses Cord. But the revelation that Cord is a wrong ‘un is kept back for the finale, with the result that the focus of the story lands more and more on Gruber’s murderous plots and the ‘sport’ aspects become vestigial.

In terms of week-on-week thrill-power, the only real currency to judge 2000AD stories, this is entirely the right decision. Gruber is a compelling grotesque, a clanking psychotic boasting a magnificent Gibbons character design, and the first appearance of a regular 2000AD trope – the surgically-made monster with an ellipsis-laden, third-person speech pattern, like a psychopathic version of Marvel’s Hulk. He only has one role to play, but he’s immediately more interesting than anyone else the Heroes are up against.

No surprise then that the strip’s finest moment is when Gruber stops hanging around on the sidelines and simply joins the opposing team. The Heroes are drawn against opposition who are all body-modified cyborgs, built to thrill and horrify viewers in the interests of their corporate owners. Gruber murders their captain and takes his place, leading to a delirious storyline in which Gruber’s reckless play keeps killing off members of his own team, who ruefully forgive him as they think he’s their skipper. It’s the best story because the on-pitch and off-pitch violence, the sporting plot and the B-plot, are united, so Harlem Heroes feels purposeful and funny, rather than a slog from opponent to opponent.

These opponents are the other memorable Harlem Heroes element, with the cyborg uglies offering a break from a succession of outfits whose set-up is “national stereotype, turned to 11”. A team of Samurai! A team of Scotsmen! Two German teams, one medieval knights and one outright neo-Nazis! There’s a line between “corny” and “offensive” with this kind of story, and it’s one 2000AD doesn’t always stay on the better side of, especially where Asian countries are concerned. Tom Tully doesn’t, by my lights, do anything too egregious in Harlem Heroes, but even the good side of that dividing line involves a lot of hackneyed tropes. 

The general line a Harlem Heroes story takes is that the opposing teams rely on violence and brute force to get their wins and intimidate rivals: the Heroes beat them by keeping their heads and outwitting them with skill and style. While they’re absolutely prepared to get physical, the Harlem Heroes don’t rely on violence in the way every other 2000AD protagonist does: when they’re tempted to, the strip explicitly positions itself against that. This flair-based approach is a nod to the Harlem Heroes’ chief inspiration, exhibition basketball stars the Harlem Globetrotters, whose fame in the UK was peaking thanks to their TV cartoon exploits. The Globetrotters source makes Giant and the Heroes unusual 2000AD characters in another way: they’re 2000AD’s first Black leads.

Concern over Black representation in comics long predates the tiresome modern complaints that comics have become too ‘woke’: in his Kings Reach memoir, John Sanders talks about a 1970s letter criticising IPC for its lack of Black characters. While his anecdote is dismissive, it’s dismissive because, in Sanders’ eyes, the complaint was groundless. IPC had plenty of Black characters. The accuracy of this is open to question, but the point is that even at the time the concept that representation mattered was familiar.

Of course, what also mattered was the roles Black characters played. In comics defined by action and violence, Black characters are often as violent as all the rest, but they aren’t uniquely or stereotypically so. And while the fact the only Black lead characters in early 2000AD and Action are athletes mirrors media stereotypes, it also reflects the fact that almost everything in the comics is a ‘dead crib’ from something or someone, so the comics’ Black heroes were always going to draw on wider portrayals of Black men. (Though the IPC “dead crib” strategy of lifting from hot action films never got as far as Blaxploitation) Action had a Black lead, the John Wagner-written boxing saga Black Jack – summary: what if Muhammad Ali was going blind? – and it frankly depicted the racism its lead character faced, though only after he decided to head to America. 

So in the context of late 70s British comics, Harlem Heroes’ status as the one Black-led 2000AD cast and the one strip where violence is not in fact the default answer feels a genuine positive. And in a series completely reliant on national stereotypes for its storylines, Tully is wise enough to stay away from that with the Heroes themselves. There’s not a lot in the strip which specifically addresses the Blackness, or for that matter the Harlem-ness, of its leads – but looking at how everyone else in the story is written, that might not be a bad thing.

The skill of the Heroes aeroball team, and the way they use that skill to win, moves to center stage as the villainous Ulysses Cord makes his move and the strip comes to its end. It turns out that Cord – shocking few readers – is the one sabotaging the Harlem Heroes as well as managing them, and his motives are interesting ones. As part of the consortium who runs the sport, he’s upset at the Heroes’ degree of skill, and the bloodless way in which they win their games. It’s making the sport predictable and less aggressive, and audiences are staying away. So the Heroes had to go.

The Harlem Heroes expose Ulysses Cord, win the aeroball championship, and earn their happy ending, though at a cost – half the team is unceremoniously offed in the final episode, with veteran Conrad King and poor Hairy (a straight lift from the Harlem Globetrotters’ bald superstar Fred “Curly” Neal) killed in a single panel. The characters may want to eschew violence, but it claims them in the end. And lingering questions remain. As I said above, 2000AD itself is on the side of violence – it’s at the heart of its promise to readers of a more visceral type of comic. 2000AD’s own ethos is a lot closer to Ulysses Cord than it is to the Harlem Heroes themselves: satisfy the audience’s desire for action, combat and, yes, blood. And if characters can’t reliably provide those? Perhaps there’s no place for them in the comic. When the Harlem Heroes return, it’s in a world where Cord was proved right: aeroball is dead, more violent options rule. And the brutal one-upmanship of comic violence will threaten not just the Heroes characters, but the comic itself.

WHERE TO FIND IT: A Complete Harlem Heroes edition – featuring this strip and sequel Inferno, is avaiable on the 2000AD webshop.

RECOMMENDED?: Dave Gibbons’ art is terrific but the repetitive stories make this one hard to fully recommend. Things pick up with the involvement of Gruber from episode 9.

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