Whatever Happened To Leon Trotsky?: INVASION!

This is a part of Discourse 2000, a blog looking at 2000AD story-by-story. It will include spoilers for all stories under discussion.

WHICH THRILL? It’s 1999 and Britain has been invaded by the Volgan Republic of Asia. Bill Savage, a lorry driver, joins the resistance to fight the occupiers.

FIRST YOU MUST LEARN HOW TO SMILE AS YOU KILL

“Not having another obvious war to turn to at the moment, IPC has invented one, in which the Russians, thinly disguised as Volgans, obliterate Birmingham with a 50-megaton bomb, end Angela Rippon’s final broadcast at the point of a bayonet and kill Mrs Thatcher on the steps of the peoples tribunal of St Pauls. It may or may not do the kids any harm.” – Guardian editorial, 22nd Febuary 1977

So let’s recap. The first thing you see in a 2000AD story is an icon of the British future under fire. The Post Office Tower, a sleek, slim, confident symbol of the “white heat of technology” opened in 1965. 34 years on it’s dying, blitzed by the Volgan paratroopers who are ending Britain as readers knew it. A few pages later, a woman Prime Minister is executed: “Shirley Brown” is a clear lookalike for Opposition leader Margaret Thatcher. By the end of Invasion!, the sole barrier between your family and tyranny is Bill Savage, a lorry driver with a shotgun. It’s the perfect introduction to the 2000AD creator Pat Mills envisaged – a futuristic comic that drew its energy from the forces shaping the present: violence, technology, power and class.

If the expanded story length of the first Dan Dare episode was a way to show off Massimo Belardinelli’s head-expanding art, Invasion! Part 1 is where Mills’ vision of 5- and 6-page strips really pays off in story terms. The sheer amount of ground that’s covered in the first episode – I’ve not even mentioned the royal family being evacuated, or the last free news broadcast – is astonishing. Birmingham gets nuked in one panel.

The density of action, and the craft with which set-up, stakes, and the hero’s situation are developed, are reminders of just how good Pat Mills could be – and how important he was to the early issues. With the Dan Dare post I was too busy introducing the blog to pay much attention to Mills, who created 2000AD, edited it through its critical first months, and wrote most of the first issue single-handedly. The story of Mills’ involvement with the comic is much told by many different people – most notably Mills’ himself, in his essential memoir Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave! There’s no real dispute about the basic facts, though. Mills was at this point a freelancer with a formidable rep, having launched the highly successful Battle and Action for IPC. He was hired to develop a science fiction comic after IPC staffer Kelvin Gosnell wrote a memo which persuaded the Youth Group bosses that such a thing might work, at least briefly. Mills worked his arse off to make the new comic a success (and justify his unusually high freelance salary for the project) and 2000AD is inseparable from the Millsian vision of what an SF comic could and should be.

One important part of this vision for an SF comic is that it wasn’t specifically SF. Mills has written great science fiction stories for 2000AD but his most acclaimed and lasting strips for the comic, Nemesis The Warlock and Sláine, are weird science-fantasy epics (whether this is just genre hair-splitting we’ll explore when we get there). More to the point – since those stories would be impossible to imagine in this initial phase of 2000AD – his insights into what a strong 70s boys’ comic should read like are genre-neutral. The one genre-driven difference in approach between Battle, Action and 2000AD is Mills’ choice to run longer strips which would allow more spectacular visuals, a key element in science fiction’s appeal. As I said in the Dan Dare post, it’s hard to emphasise enough how important this decision was. But it sits alongside the ideas Mills carried over from his other launches.

What were they? The most basic one is that the TV kids were watching – especially the TV not designed for them to watch – was massively more exciting than what comics were providing. The other is that the mass of working class readers in Britain had no adventure comics which reflected their own lives, families and backgrounds. British adventure heroes still acted like public schoolboys, even if they weren’t: and American imports were too remote and fantastical to appeal (Mills has never hidden his contempt for superheroes).

These ideas set the tone of all Mills’ 70s comic launches for IPC, and they shape what 2000AD is. Start with the title, chosen as a year the comics’ readers would assume they’d live to see. If Dan Dare is delivering on the wild intergalactic promise of SF, the rest of the comic is firmly grounded in the present – while Invasion! is supposedly set 20 years in the future, only a couple of its stories imagine any kind of near-future tech advances (a Channel Tunnel! Savage disapproves), and the landscapes and characters are familiar to any 1977 reader. Because the centre of Mills’ vision for 2000AD was the idea of anti-authoritarian, working-class characters readers could recognise, the social order in the strips had to be a close match to the present. Very few, if any, 2000AD strips, take place in a Utopia: precious few in a world where there’s been any noticeable progress.

YOU’RE NICKED

Mills’ ideas are instantly visible in Invasion!, even when he hands the scripting over to Battle alumnus Gerry Finley-Day with the second episode. The most important thing in those early episodes isn’t Bill Savage’s early skirmishes with the Volgs – it’s obvious how those are going to turn out. It’s the way Finley-Day sets up his relationship with his supporting cast in the British Resistance, notably the ex-army officer Peter Silk. Silk and Savage contrast in exactly the way their names suggest: one dapper and smooth (he’s rarely seen without his sunglasses, a useful visual shorthand given how often the artists change), the other rough-edged. But this isn’t a double act. Silk may be the most competent of the ex-army guys Savage teams up with, but that isn’t saying much: he’s less dynamic and energetic than Savage, and his main role in the stories is either to fail to do something Savage pulls off, or to doubt Savage’s abilities and be proved constantly wrong. 

In other words, the conflict in Invasion! Isn’t just “will Savage stop the Volgs?” it’s “how will Bill stop the Resistance screwing up?”. The battle against the Volgs is the macro conflict of each episode, but the tension often comes from class conflict – the pessimistic professionalism of Silk and other military Resistance types with the working-class bottle and nous of Savage’s many friends and contacts. Savage is the Millsian anti-authoritarian hero par excellence – he resists the illegitimate authority of the Volgans, but also shows up the remnants of legitimate authority for the joke it is.

Invasion! is one of what Kevin O’Neill later called the “Sweeney style” stories of early 2000AD, after the hugely successful and influential 70s British cop show. The Sweeney’s great innovation in a crowded genre was toughness: its Flying Squad protagonists were hardmen and Ian Kennedy Martin’s show worked hard at staying true to the realities of policing. It was one of the shows which persuaded Mills that kids’ comics were having their lunch eaten by TV, which could provide action, violence and drama on a level way beyond where the cautious, censorious IPC were willing to go.

2000AD’s troubled predecessor Action is more obviously in the tough-TV style, but it carries over strongly to the Prog too. As we’ve seen, Mills’ decision to run longer strips meant a broader canvas for the toughness, so stories could sell moments of extreme action better – that opening splash page of the attack on the Post Office Tower is a brilliant example, difficult to imagine in a 3-pager. But the most obvious feature of the Sweeney strips is their protagonists – remorseless, rule-defying, tough as hell and magnetically appealing to readers. Protagonists like Bill Savage.

Of all 2000AD’s tough-guy protagonists, none carry their strip to the degree Bill Savage does. Judge Dredd, and later on Rogue Trooper and Strontium Dog‘s Johnny Alpha, are guys you enjoy seeing get shit done but they exist in extraordinary worlds full of extraordinary characters, and the stories can always take the focus off them and show the reader those things. Bill Savage operates in plain old Britain, albeit occupied – there is no wonder to be found in anything the Volgs can do, so the thrill of Invasion! is all about seeing Bill Savage take them out in wildly imaginative ways. Given the chance to do a story about a one-man army, Finley-Day absolutely goes for it – the gonzo pleasure of Invasion (well captured in the excellent Space Spinner 2000 podcast) is in seeing Savage yell about “ME CANNON” and blow Volgs away even when he’s in the bath.

Tough guys were the concrete in which 2000AD was anchored. But the Sweeney model was not an inherently comfortable fit with science fiction. For one thing, as we’ve seen in Dan Dare, there’s an implicit strangeness to SF which Sweeney strips don’t hang well with – the Belardinelli or Kevin O’Neill factor where you needed to find stories on which artists could go wild and deliver fantastic visions you could never see on TV. But even beyond that, the Sweeney model strips in Action had prided themselves on a kind of realism: Look Out For Lefty!, one of its sports strips, hit harder for its relatively true-to-life portrayal of fans, hooligans, and on-pitch aggro. 

But this was obviously much easier in a real-world story. The ways detectives Regan and Carter in The Sweeney itself step over the line have dramatic weight because everyone broadly understands and recognises the context; they know there is a line. In what I’m going to call Sweeney-Fi, the 2000AD-native mutation of the style, that context is just another thing you have to establish. And realism in a boys’ adventure strip with an action hero is a difficult ask anyway. For all its vernacular vigour, Invasion! still wants you to buy the idea that one lorry driver with a shotgun can make a meaningful difference in a totalitarian Britain. 

GERRY’S WAR

That’s not impossible, but it’s a difficult line to walk. It foregrounds one of the big questions about serial comics: the question of where a strip is going. This problem is familiar in Marvel and DC Comics through what Stan Lee notoriously called “the illusion of change”; the fact that these stories need to continually entertain, and can promise major shifts in the status quo, while never evolving too far away from their basic premise. The illusion of change is a problem of success – it hits when a long-running character becomes well known and successful enough that a template version exists in the public or fan mind, and changes to that template become difficult to make. Though not impossible – it would be hard now to imagine a version of Lois Lane who didn’t know Clark Kent’s secret, but this isn’t the relationship the characters had before the early 90s.

2000AD will run into illusion of change issues eventually, but because it’s a problem of success the only strip where that’s initially a factor is Dan Dare, and there you could argue that the fact a version of Dare exists in the public eye is what gives 2000AD their repeated opportunities to try and make their take work, at the same time as ensuring it probably won’t. So the problem 2000AD has early on is slightly different – more an illusion of momentum. At this stage most 2000AD strips aren’t designed as complete stories; they’re premises within which stories can be told. The question is whether that premise has a destination – an end point towards which it’s working, or trigger elements which can finish the story in a satisfying way in case the reader polls turn bad and the strip (or frankly the comic) has to pull the shutters down. And if it does have a destination, how do you vary the week-by-week storytelling enough to keep the wheels spinning for however long you’re given until you get there?

Invasion! is a war story, and most war stories have a very obvious historical destination which makes them the kind of strip that’s easy to end well. A strip about a platoon fighting their way across occupied Europe after D-Day has an ultimate endpoint which everyone knows, but can fit in umpteen escapades on the road to victory. Gerry Finley-Day’s spin on this well-worn concept for Battle, D-Day Dawson, adds another trigger element – his hero has a bullet lodged close to his heart, Tony Stark style, which will ultimately kill him (And did, despite the strip’s popularity – not the last time a Finley-Day war story would hit its foretold end with stories arguably left untold).

Finley-Day was a specialist in war stories, and an old hand at sustaining a series via the illusion of momentum, ringing the changes on a basic episodic plot as the overall structure inched forward. But in a future war story this is a slightly different challenge. Wars have histories; future war does not. As the story of the Volgan occupation of Britain, Invasion! is working towards an implied end. Bill Savage’s one-man war can’t be the turning point in that story without compromising the (fairly tenuous) claim to gritty realism that makes the Sweeney-Fi approach stand out; and the scope of the strip can’t expand too far away from Savage to tell the wider story without spoiling its anti-authoritarian appeal – even Peter Silk never gets any kind of spotlight.

So Invasion exists for its first few months in a state of hamster-wheel motion, in which Savage can pull off outrageous, against-all-odds wins against the Volgs every week but in which the wider course of the occupation is oblique. It’s a credit to Finley-Day that he pulls this stasis off so well: Invasion is so brutal, exciting and imaginatively plotted at the episode level that you simply don’t care about the overall story. This is one of Finley-Day’s great virtues as a writer – he’s a master of the adventure story equivalent of the locked room mystery: you give the reader a problem, and the equipment or characters to solve it, and part of the pleasure is guessing how it’s actually going to pan out.

With Invasion, guessing wasn’t always easy. An example from late in the strip’s run: Savage, Silk, and the well-meaning but hopeless Prince John (the heir to the throne who Savage is having to keep out of Volgan hands) have ended up at Balmoral, a Volg patrol hot on their heels. Savage is out of ammo, so they hide out in the Prince’s boyhood den, in which there are blank shell cartridges and a stag’s head. Someone has tipped off the Volgs; our heroes are trapped. But Savage uses the blank shells to propel the antlers from the stag’s head at such speed they become deadly missiles, spearing the Volgs. Britain is safe for another week!

As that summary suggests, Finley-Day’s stories became a little baroque as Invasion went on. One of the other great things about him as a writer is that he can turn out tight, formulaic war stories week upon week and then suddenly come up with some of the most bizarre plots in the entire comic. In one episode, a captured Bill Savage pretends to be obsessed with the Loch Ness Monster in order to trick the Volgan commander into a televised women’s wrestling match. Even better, this incident turns out to be the inciting story for Invasion!’s run to its climax, as the humiliated Commander Rosa plots her revenge on Savage and his friends.

But this means the second half of Invasion starts to pull further and further from its Sweeney-Fi beginnings, with the grit and gestures at realism falling back as Savage tours the country and gets involved in the Prince John plot – the most on-the-nose and yet absurd of all Invasion’s treatments of class conflict. Savage is still a tough guy – as series regular Mike Dorey draws him in the final story he’s a bruised, bloodied, snarling force of nature – but his story has slipped into fantasy.

As a weekly romp, that’s no bad thing – the second half of Invasion! is often ludicrous, but it’s even more entertaining and unpredictable than the strip’s first months, as Finley-Day delights in putting Savage in ridiculous situations, like spending several episodes undercover in a travelling circus. The art on the strip has settled down by this point, too. In the early parts it changes hands continually, and the only real consistency is the look of Savage himself, presumably because the artists had photo reference from Hell Drivers, the British 40s noir whose lead he’s based on. But later on Dorey and Spanish artist Carlos Pino switch in and out of the strip: I’m more taken by Dorey’s weighty, roughed-up figures, and his grimy, glowering backgrounds (a sooty effect created by applying an inky J-Cloth to the page!) but both artists produce dependably brutal work without Invasion ever being a visual highlight of the prog. (Dorey also has home advantage – European artists have a tendency to make the Britain of 1999 a little too picture-postcard)

So the art finds its range as the stories get wilder – a good combination for a strip. But Invasion!’s development shows some of the limits to the Sweeney-Fi style. From the opening episodes, it’s setting up a hard-edged, take-no-prisoners saga of a country under occupation, but as the rest of the comic starts to accelerate into strangeness and satire, Invasion’s more grounded storylines look out of place. Behind the scenes, as Mills explains in his book, the editorial team were beginning to notice a shift in readership opinion. The kids reading Battle and Action had been sticklers for realism, or what they understood it to be, dismissing apparently outrageous plot points as “stupid” (Mills gives the example of a dog wearing a gas mask in Battle, a real incident firmly rejected by the readers). But 2000AD readers didn’t have the same concerns, and while the anti-authoritarian tone of those early strips thrived, the one-foot-in-the-real-world approach gradually fell away.

(Mills himself recognised that the strip he started was something of a missed opportunity – he came back decades later for a new series following up on Savage’s adventures in a style suited to 2000AD’s now more adult readers.)

BLOC SHOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS

Invasion’s credentials as a tough near-future strip were undermined from the beginning, though, as the most notorious story about its development showed, a story that puts the spotlight on the question: what, if any, are this story’s politics? The Volgans are, transparently, meant to be Russians, and Russians they actually were until two days before press, when IPC Youth Group head John Sanders last-minute nerves led to frenzied pre-publication art corrections by Kevin O’Neill. 

The switch wasn’t, as far as I know, down to any specifically political misgivings: it’s more a symptom of a general nervousness around the comic’s launch in the wake of the Action furore. Why make rods for your own backs? As it turns out Sanders’ misgivings were both accurate and pointless. Everyone realised the invaders were Russian. 2000AD got disapproving coverage from the Guardian, who felt it not quite in the spirit of the Helsinki Accords, and a helping of harmless publicity with Sanders insisting in interview that no, the Volgan Republic of Asia was something quite different.

But the inability to have the Volgans be what they transparently were does change the strip. Even if it’s an obvious figleaf, it’s one which blunts the story’s violence and its connection to real-world politics. And Britain-invaded stories are always political, whatever else they are. The genre’s origins date back to the late 19th Century and the wave of invasion literature kicked off by 1871’s The Battle Of Dorking, with the most famous SF contribution being, of course, War Of The Worlds. (Michael Moorcock, who wrote a letter deploring the state of British comics in response to the Guardian piece, published an anthology of Edwardian invasion fantasy later in 1977 including Saki’s “When William Came”) 

Boys’ papers in the run-up to World War I enthusiastically took up the theme, with the Daily Mail’s Viscount Northcliffe’s stable leading the charge. The Northcliffe papers ran a barrage of stories called things like “Britain At Bay”, “The Peril To Come”, and simply “Doom”. Working-class heroes like Bill Savage didn’t feature much. But the thrust of the stories was as clear as the thunderous campaigns in Northcliffe’s newspapers, and as highly politicised – Britain was under threat; it desperately needed to arm itself and be prepared. Invasion literature was immensely popular even though it could never admit to one truth behind its appeal – that this was a guilty nightmare of its European neighbours doing to Britain what Britain had done to so many other parts of the world, and a fantasy that we, unlike the places we colonised, would throw off the invading yoke.

It was maybe a vague memory of this blood-and-thunder approach – and its presumed effect on sales – that prompted John Sanders to suggest a Russian invasion story in the first place. Mills, as Sanders tells it, had more misgivings and was only persuaded by the promise of executing Thatcher in episode one. So the switch to Volgans was both cosmetic and meaningful – even though it fooled nobody, it removed the most obviously provocative elements of doing a literal Soviet invasion story in the middle of the Cold War, a comics equivalent of 1984’s Red Dawn. 

The sting of controversy was drawn enough that the Soviet Embassy press officer, Valery Zemskov, was magnanimous about the bait offered: “It does not matter which country this comic reminds us of”, he told the Guardian, while offering some general bromides on the purpose of children’s education.

Zemskov’s comments aligned with the Guardian’s general position on the comic, which was more rooted in concerns about the existing traditions of war comics than in whatever 2000AD was actually trying to do. The assumption the paper made was that British comics were beginning to run out of things to do with the Nazis, and were casting around for another viable foe: the worry was less around Invasion! itself, but at the idea it might represent a new, ongoing front in Cold War propaganda, in the way “Britain At Bay” and “Doom” made their own small contribution to the drumbeats of war in the Edwardian era. Would the boys’ comics of tomorrow be full of villainous Russkies? 

In fact the opposite happens – the change means the Volgs are a generic war story enemy, which means, essentially, the Nazis (tiny echoes of the original premise survive quite late on – like the Volgans rubbishing British circuses compared to the ones back home). But the switch adds an air of unreality to the story which Finley-Day’s later, wilder plotting happily runs with. In one way, that unreality is helpful: Invasion! is not really meant to be taken seriously as a piece of near-future SF. Its backstory, at least in this original run, is a machine for putting the one-man-resistance-fighter pieces in place. But you can figure out the context easily enough from what we do see, i.e. a European war with a limited nuclear exchange which results in Volgan control of a weakened Europe and Britain. The obvious question here is – why is NATO so feeble? You have to assume that it’s broken down, perhaps with an isolationist US regime giving tacit permission for the Volgan Republic to expand its sphere of influence. Mills filled in a lot of the answers to this in his later Savage strips, and this is one of the parts of early 2000AD that seems somewhat more credible in 2024 than in 1977.

Ultimately the week-on-week politics of Invasion don’t have much to do with the Volgans at all; they’re not operating on the macro level of international relations as the micro level of representation. After a good few stories knocking around the Volgans in London, Savage hits the road, crossing Britain from the Cheddar Gorge to the Scottish Highlands and meeting up with dockers, miners, oilmen, loggers and circus folk as he goes. All of them, naturally, prove a great deal more useful than the officer-led ‘official’ Resistance.

In Action, every week, a member of staff would pop up somewhere in Britain ready to give the first reader to spot him five pounds (an old trick, dating back at least to the Daily Express’ Kolly Kibber in the 1930s). Tharg was fairly generous with his payouts to readers but he eschewed that kind of localised gimmick. But perhaps Bill Savage’s tour of Britain served a similar purpose, emphasising that even in a science-fiction comic the regions of Britain had a part to play. It’s also a way of spotlighting a range of working men as the backbone of the UK resistance.

And for me this is Invasion!’s legacy in the comic, and the legacy of the whole ‘Sweeney-Fi’ style. Invasion! is a wish-fulfilment comic of sorts; it asks you to imagine what you would do if your country was invaded, and lets you dream that you would be as ruthless and resourceful as Bill Savage. And unlike Dan Dare, Bill Savage could be you, or more likely your Dad. So could his motley friends who show up from trades and in places where comic heroes don’t usually come from. Which opens doors, as while 2000AD moves away from contemporary and near-future settings it keeps this idea of everyday, working-class SF heroes . If a lorry driver and a lady wrestler can be the heroes of a science fiction comic, so can a sewer robot, or a Birmingham pipe-fitter, or an unemployed girl from the 50th century, or a time-lost Camden layabout. So can anybody. 

HOW TO READ IT: Every episode of Invasion! is collected in a bumper edition available on the 2000AD webshop.

RECOMMENDED?: Episode 1 is a masterclass in setting up a series. After that almost any random episode is extremely entertaining, but it’s best dipped into rather than read in one sitting.

NEXT PROG: It’s FLESH! The story that proves 2000AD wasn’t just about outrageous levels of violence, it could handle themes and ideas. AND outrageous levels of violence.

Invasion! and 2000AD (c) Rebellion