This is the home post for Discourse 2000, a new series on about the UK comic 2000AD. I’m guessing most of the audience for this project know the basics about what 2000AD is, but JUST IN CASE –
2000AD – officially “2000 AD”, but it feels weird giving it that space – is a weekly anthology comic which was launched in 1977 by magazine publisher IPC, and is published today by Rebellion. At the time it launched, the best case scenario was that the comic would last a few years until a predicted fad for science fiction burned itself out. The worst case scenario was that, like most IPC titles, it would be merged with another title within months. It did rather better than expected.
Most 2000AD stories are science fiction, but not all, and the type and tone of stories the comic runs varies widely – part of the point of this blog is to look for patterns in that variety. Its most famous character is unquestionably ‘lawman of the future’ Judge Dredd, but Dredd rarely takes up more than 20% of the weekly ‘Prog’, and this series is as much about all the other stories 2000AD readers have enjoyed (or endured) over the years.
I’ll talk more about why I’m doing this project in the first actual post, on the generally quite un-2000AD-ish Dan Dare. This one is an introduction, a schedule, and a chance to acknowledge sources and inspirations.
A quick note on format. Each “season” of Discourse 2000 will look at the strips that launched during a year of 2000AD, with each post looking at a different story, and – I hope – themes and ideas emerging over the course of the season. Long running strips, like Judge Dredd or Strontium Dog, will get a separate post each year.
This is a slightly different approach from the two main ways of writing about 2000AD. Readers revisiting the early years tend to take the comic issue by issue – as you would have done when it came out – and embark on a “prog slog”, one Prog at a time. Critics understandably cherry pick, looking at highlights or at collected editions of individual strips.
This blog is a combination of the two. I’m writing critical pieces on individual stories, but in a broadly chronological way (there will be occasional tweaks in the running order if it helps the flow of pieces better). While nobody planned on collecting stories until the early 80s, there were strips even at the beginning which – I reckon – you can only usefully treat as a whole. But the development of 2000AD, the way different writers tried out different approaches and wrote with an eye on what had gone before in the comic as well as on the rest of media, makes a chronological approach worthwhile. Also, it’s fun!
Still, there’s a necessary artifice in what I’m doing. All these stories were originally served up together, one episode at a time, with a week to wait between each one. That context can’t be recovered now, and I’m not going to try, but you should bear it in mind.
While a “season” is running I’ll be sticking to a thrice-weekly posting schedule, with new entries up on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Once a season is done, the project will go on hiatus while I write the next one!
Here’s the season 1 schedule:
- Dan Dare – Monday 26th August
- Invasion! – Wednesday 28th
- Flesh – Friday 30th
- MACH 1 – Monday 2nd September
- Harlem Heroes – Wednesday 4th
- Judge Dredd – Friday 6th
- Shako – Monday 9th
- Tharg The Mighty – Wednesday 11th
- Tharg’s Future Shocks – Friday 13th
- Inferno – Monday 16th
…and I’m working on an interlude post between Seasons 1 and 2.
2000AD is well trodden ground: as the standard-bearer of British comics for decades, it’s had a lot of critical and historical attention. My writing in this blog, more than anything else I’ve done, relies on the work of many others – for the historical parts, I’ve been a synthesist not an original researcher, though I’m sure I’ve made new and exciting errors and assumptions!
So I ought to mention and thank some of the people whose footsteps I’m following here.
The best overall history of 2000AD is David Bishop’s Thrill-Power Overload: I used its updated edition, with new material added by Karl Stock, to give me the broad outline of how 2000AD happened and how it developed. Karl Stock’s more recent book, Comic Book Punks, has an even more up-to-date account of the genesis of 2000AD and a huge amount on the comics context it existed in.
Several of the people most highly involved in the launch have told their own stories. Pat Mills’ Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave! is vital reading, not just to get the creator of 2000AD’s version of how it went down but to get some insight into the motivation and inspiration of the single most important creative figure in the stories I’m covering. John Sanders’ Kings’ Reach Tower is extremely useful for the management-eye view of 2000AD’s birth and the realities of IPC in the late 70s. Finally, Steve MacManus’ The Mighty One will be crucial in later seasons but has a lot of useful stuff on the early days too.
Supplementing this is the vital work being done getting the creators who worked on 2000AD to tell their stories, mostly on the official 2000AD Thrillcast. PR Droid Michael Molcher, aka Molch-R’s interviews with people like Kelvin Gosnell, Dave Gibbons, Mick McMahon, Brian Bolland and many others have been fascinating in their own right and helped shape my ideas about the work those people did. Michael Molcher’s own recent book on Judge Dredd, I Am The Law, is also a must-read, and is likely to shape thinking about the Judge and his (and our) world for a long time to come.
I’m also indebted to previous critics of 2000AD, though I’ve tried to avoid long reviews and discussions until I’ve put mine up. Douglas Wolk’s Dredd Reckoning blog shaped a lot of my ideas about Dredd as a multi-decade story, and how it’s been received by people who didn’t grow up in Britain reading it. The Space Spinner 2000 podcast is a bursting with enthusiasm journey through 2000AD history a month at a time and discovering it has been an absolute delight: listen to Space Spinner if you want an idea of how gonzo the early progs can be. And the Mega City Book Club podcast offers critical insight and a very good guide as to the various editions and reprints of classic stories.
Finally, the Down The Tubes site is invaluable for the wider context of British comics during 2000AD’s rise (and has lots of stuff on 2000AD itself, of course). And I owe a major debt to the work of critic Elizabeth Sandifer, whose TARDIS Eruditorum inspired the format of this project – her Last War In Albion covers this era of British comics through the lens of a magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, and is highly recommended, as is her Patreon.
And, of course, a huge thankyou to Tharg – the alien editor of 2000AD – and all his droids, without whose tireless efforts there’d be nothing to write about. Most of these stories are in print or available in digital form at the 2000AD webshop.
This has, so far, been a hugely satisfying project to work on – it’s a joy to revisit, and hopefully find interesting things to say about, some of my own prehistory, and characters and creators that have fixed themselves in my head for life. As I say in the first entry, this is me trying to do right by 2000AD. I truly hope you enjoy it.
Each Discourse 2000 entry is headed with a lyric from the relevant year – here’s the official D2000 playlist!