Makes You Feel Bad For The Rest: THARG THE MIGHTY

This is part of Discourse 2000, a story-by-story exploration of UK weekly comic 2000AD. Contains spoilers!

WHICH THRILL?: Tharg The Mighty is the alien editor of 2000AD, who occasionally takes time out from his work running the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic to star in his own adventures.

HE’D LIKE TO COME AND MEET US BUT HE THINKS HE’LL BLOW OUR MINDS

Zarjaz. Scrotnig. Splundig Vur Thrigg. Galactic Groats. Rigelian Hotshots. Quaxxan. Squaxx Dek Thargo. The Dictators Of Zrag. 2000AD, and 2000AD fandom, has its own private lingo, built around the words of 2000AD’s alien editor Tharg The Mighty, a Betelgeusian with a healthy regard for his own abilities who operates out of his ‘Nerve Centre’ HQ. Aside from one mid-90s attempt to defenestrate him, Tharg has been a constant presence in 2000AD since Prog 1, and it’s all I can do as a fan not to open these posts with his cheery greeting of “Borag Thungg”.

Tharg’s role in 2000AD goes somewhat beyond the standard editorial duties on a boys’ comic. He hosts the letters page, as was usual, and makes announcements. But he’s also a 2000AD character himself, and occasionally gets his own stories, which I’ll be covering here. And these stories also do double duty, mixing goofy myth-building adventures with coded transmissions reflecting actual goings-on behind the scenes of 2000AD.

But first let’s answer the obvious question: why did 2000AD have an alien editor in the first place?

Readers of weekly comics were not mugs. They knew the life of a new title was not a long one. Why get too attached, especially when new comics bidding for their precious 7 or 8 pence of pocket money appeared on a weekly basis? So anything that could make them feel more loyalty to the comic, that might keep them buying a few precious weeks longer, was worth doing. An editorial figurehead’s job was to set a tone, but also to project reassurance and confidence. The fictional editor could act as the embodiment of a brand, the head of that wider implied community of readers you joined every time you opened an issue.

But there was a less charming reason to have a fake editor, too. DC Thomson’s Warlord was ‘edited’ from its 1974 launch by Lord Peter Flint, aka Codename: Warlord, who was also its lead character. And Flint’s was the only name, staff or creator, that you’d see in an issue of Warlord. The notoriously secretive DC Thomson had a strict no-credits policy. But so did 2000AD for its first few months, and the rest of IPC for a lot longer. The official reason for not offering credit was that the readers didn’t care about such things and would only be confused. The unofficial reasons were that credits would lead writers and artists to make a name for themselves, leading to the unacceptable outcomes of asking for more rights and money or being poached by competitors. (These fears were fully justified, and it serves management right.)

So a fictional editor was a way of stopping readers asking who was actually writing and drawing the stories they enjoyed. On Action and early 2000AD, though, the editorial setup as presented was a lie that hid one truth (the actual creators) but told another. What Pat Mills, Geoff Kemp, Steve McManus, John Wagner, Kelvin Gosnell et al were doing really was something individual, an odd little knot of internal resistance to the IPC norm. The combination of real clubhouse mentality and fake editor created a particular tension, which would have a major impact on 2000AD.

It’s worth taking a quick look at how Action presented itself editorially, though, because it worked very well. They worked hard to create an us-vs-them editorial tone, making readers feel they were part of a gang united against the snobby, repressive or simply boring elements of British life. “Action Man” – a barely anonymised Steve MacManus – was written to his irritation as someone who boozed and partied in between entertaining the readers with stunts. Small boy anathemas like the Bay City Rollers were held up as “Twit Of The Week”. And, in a clever touch, Action’s anti-authoritarian tone extended to the editorial pages: we never heard from the editor himself, only seeing reports via “Action Man” of the unfair treatment meted out by his superior “Ol’ Wooden Leg”.

It all created a sense of intense loyalty to the comic; kids felt like it was on their side. John Sanders’ favourite riposte to critics was to let them open letters at random from the voluminous Action mailbag, knowing every one would be positive.

Any way in which 2000AD could recreate that loyalty was extremely valuable. So the new comic went beyond Action in terms of actually embodying the spirit of the comic in one alien-ish body, pushing the idea of the editorial figurehead harder and further. A lot of the trimmings of Tharg – the concept, the join-our-club alien language, and obviously the look (mostly a gorilla mask painted green, plus ponytail and jumpsuit) – are there right from the beginning. But while he’s a design triumph, what makes Tharg stand out from other fake editors is his attitude. 

Because, given everything we’ve seen about the rest of 2000AD, Tharg presents an obvious conceptual problem. 2000AD prides itself on an anti-heroic, anti-authoritarian streak. An editor, though, is by definition the comic’s resident authority figure, at least as far as readers understand it. When a revived Eagle launched in 1982, it chose to unmask its editor, in line with a somewhat more traditional and sober-minded outlook: David Hunt operated in a space between agony uncle, ringmaster, and referee, taking readers to task when he felt they needed it. That kind of patrician approach would have been absolutely wrong for Tharg, setting the comic’s bubbling bolshiness implicitly against its figurehead. 

Why not keep him offstage, a la Action’s Old Wooden Leg? Their problem was that someone had to introduce the editorial content, and a science fiction comic demanded someone unusual. Later on, Pat Mills would create a character who feels ideally suited to the job of winning over the readers while thumbing his (non-existent) nose at authority, the sewer robot Ro-Jaws. Ro-Jaws did indeed take on a bunch of editorial duties, and maybe if he’d been in the mix sooner, Tharg would never have got the foothold he did. But maybe not: Tharg is a wonderful creation.

IT AIN’T EASY BEING GREEN

Instead, 2000AD carved out a conceptual space for Tharg similar to the one evolving around Dredd. A future cop would have to be an ultimate cop, all the elements of cop-dom exaggerated to ridiculous degree. And a future editor would have to be, well, Tharg, a being of imperial confidence, galactic knowledge, and theatrical pomposity, who was also very clearly a man in a green gorilla mask. Tharg’s addresses to the reader mixed booming pronouncements of the thrill-levels inherent in 2000AD, dismissals of feeble rivals, and nuggets of alien lore. 

“The Mighty One” earned his bombast – 2000AD genuinely was a lot more exciting than the competition, and the creators knew it. But the readers didn’t just have to sit and take Tharg at his word. Tharg’s mission on Earth was constantly threatened and mocked not just by his crew of feckless or mutinous droids but by a readership tacitly encouraged to try and catch him out in their pursuit of the weekly “Galactic Groats” prize.

The result was a comic which gave itself a release valve for both pride and frustration. Feuds with rival publishers could be conducted in the pages of Tharg stories; so could tacit reference to ongoing office politics. The constant image of the droids as put-upon slave labourers masked, but also reflected, a reality where IPC were constantly pushing back on demands for credits and creators rights.

Robot Wars effectively established a tone for Dredd, and a tone for Tharg arrived in strip form only a few weeks later: “Tharg And The Intruder”, a three pager drawn by Kevin O’Neill, in which a snotty young fan of rival “Wonder Comics” gets a tour of the office and finds himself menaced by threats from the stories before getting his brain blown by the unfettered thrill-power of upcoming tales.

The story is a house ad for the then-imminent Future Shocks series, but it nicely sets up Tharg’s personality for future stories, and there are two other reasons to care about it. The first is that it’s an extended look at O’Neill, who was involved with 2000AD from the beginning and became one of the comic’s best-loved artists. Kevin O’Neill was the Assistant Art Editor at the launch of 2000AD, a job which week-on-week seemed to mostly involve applying copious amounts of whitener to pages which crossed the lines of brutality the comic was continually testing. It was he, for instance, who had the thankless task of switching Soviet insignia for Volgan ones when John Sanders changed his mind about the baddies in Invasion!

But O’Neill was an artist himself, contributing art to features, extra pages, and occasional covers (the issue with “Tharg And The Intruder” has a particular gem). O’Neill’s humans were odd, cartoonish, more indebted to humour comic greats like Ken Reid than to the pulpy realism of the “Spanish School”, and indeed his first quasi-serial for 2000AD was the giant monster gag strip Bonjo From Beyond The Stars, which occasionally graced Tharg’s Nerve Centre page and looked like a refugee from Monster Fun or Cor!, except with dodgy ‘ethnic’ jokes.

Where O’Neill really shone, though, and what made him one of 2000AD’s greatest assets, were his monsters and robots. It would take a while for the monsters to really come through, but O’Neill’s robots are on point almost at once – baroque, bristling hunks of machinery, studded with weird angles and weapons and spikes but with a thrilling solidity too. O’Neill robots grind, roll, crush and carve their way across 2000AD’s first decade, and his style arrived almost fully formed: UK indie publisher Dark And Golden reprinted a 1976 fanzine, Mek-Memoirs, full of his already recognisable bots. In “Tharg And The Intruder” O’Neill adds a few of his Meks into ‘Tharg’s Museum’ and, more consequentially, introduces the idea that the comic is written and drawn by robots.

The second interesting thing about the story is that ‘Wonder Comics’ is a very thinly disguised Marvel UK – O’Neill draws an obvious Incredible Hulk on the kid’s T-Shirt – so “Tharg And The Intruder” is a direct challenge to one of its rivals. But what were Marvel Comics up to, and why did Tharg care?

OPPORTUNITIES (LET’S MAKE LOTS OF MONEY)

Tharg’s Marvel UK opposite number at the time was Neil Tennant, the latest in a string of editors who’d run Marvel’s transatlantic branch office. While this was no imperial phase for Marvel UK, Tennant’s tenure was a successful and important one, even if the biggest decisions weren’t his to make. The most crucial one – entirely driven by the New York operation – was the choice to run original stories for the first time in a British Marvel comic, with Captain Britain #1 launching in October 1976. It shared newsagent shelf space with the swastika-dominated final pre-ban issue of Action.

Action and Battle were on Tennant’s mind, as a publisher trying to make an impact against the British weekly big two. He later suggested the short-lived Fury, a repackaging of Marvel’s own war and adventure comics, to tap into that market. Its tempting covers were by IPC’s hottest artists like Carlos Ezquerra, so whether Tennant or another staffer, whoever commissioned them knew their local stuff. But behind the fantastic covers lurked disappointment. Fury exposed the major issues holding Marvel UK strips back from really competing with British material. Marvel’s war comics were entertaining but – to generalise wildly – 60s and early 70s American war comics were Comics Code approved dilutions of the huge steps made by Harvey Kurtzman at EC in the 1950s. In Britain, though, the evolution of war comics was moving in the other direction, with Battle and DC Thomson’s Warlord itching to find new, grittier ways to approach the subject. Marvel’s material was simply tamer than the UK alternative.

Tamer didn’t necessarily mean less sophisticated. The majority of the teens and adults who made up 70s British fandom much preferred American comics to the British ones – 2000AD was the first IPC title to make any kind of cut-through – and that was down to the longer stories creating a much richer canvas for plotting, longer-term characterisation, and more subtle pacing. Did every mid 70s Marvel comic make the best use of these advantages? Certainly not – and frustratingly for the UK repackagers, it was a moment when the most famous titles had the most mediocre stories. The Fantastic Four, Thor, Spider-Man and others were deep in their long post-Stan hangover. A formulaic comic is annoying when it runs to 3 or 4 pages; at 18-20 it becomes insufferable. In America the non-superhero genre books were providing more exciting material, and Marvel UK had tried to pick the best of these – Tomb Of Dracula, Master Of Kung-Fu, Conan – but to mixed commercial results.

So Marvel UK had less exciting stories; their best work didn’t sell; and the characters people knew were in slumps. But even beyond all that, they had significant formal issues to deal with, running colour artwork in black and white, and chopping up monthly stories to suit weekly serialisation. This last was a real blow to the aesthetics of their comics. Great cliffhangers are part of the weekly anthology art, giving you multiple chances to hook readers back for next week. American Marvels put less emphasis on cliffhangers in any case – a month is a long time to bank on readers’ anticipation – and on top of this Marvel UK needed to cut stories in two or three. It found itself trying, and often failing, to find moments of nail-biting drama and tension in stories never written or paced for them.

Captain Britain could have solved these problems – for a while, later, it did. But even in its most competent incarnation – the first handful of issues by Chris Claremont and Herb Trimpe, setting up an origin, a base, a supporting cast – there’s something stodgy and half-hearted about early Captain Britain. He’s too plainly a character constructed according to a template set out 15 years and 3000 miles away. Despite the material being written for the weekly format, its US writers don’t have any better sense of how to pace a weekly serial, with flabby stories lacking momentum. And even the dreariest UK boys’ adventure strip had more sense of place, meaning Captain Britain loses the one great advantage Marvel UK had – the exotic romance of reading American comics – with nothing to replace it.

By the time “Tharg And The Intruder” appeared, Captain Britain was floundering, offering readers such nerve-shredding stories as five issues of Cap trying and failing to beat a radio controlled hawk. 2000AD were happy to put the boot in, with Tharg slating “Wonder Comics” as “primitive entertainment”. But why bother at all? Kelvin Gosnell – by this time the man behind the editorial gorilla mask – must have known Marvel UK had more in their locker than Captain Britain.

While it wouldn’t see print until February 1978 – and I’ll talk about it more in the 1978 write-ups – Marvel UK had the British rights to its American parent’s Star Wars adaptation, a comic which had turned their fortunes around just as the movie was crushing the US Box Office. A 1975 article on the in-production Star Wars was what prompted Gosnell to suggest a science fiction comic in the first place – 2000AD predated Star Wars, but couldn’t have existed without it. And a UK Star Wars comic was the single greatest threat to the Prog’s future success. Shoring up readers’ loyalties via a reminder from Tharg was surely prudent. “Tharg And The Intruder” ends with the boastful Wonder Comics reader a gibbering wreck, sent back to recover from an overdose of thrill power brought on from glimpsing the “Future Shocks” in Tharg’s secret vault. Real readers, the story underlined, were made of sterner stuff.

The irony in all this is that the single most obvious antecedent for Tharg The Mighty and his role comes from Marvel Comics themselves. Tharg’s infinite self-regard, his private jokes and language, and his exasperated relationship with creators are all lifts from Stan Lee’s on-page persona as editor, writer and “Presenter” of Marvel. For outside consumption, Stan The Man created a version of the Marvel Bullpen as a crazy sitcom readers could buy into, play along with and feel part of. Tharg’s Nerve Centre at Kings’ Reach Tower was cut from similar cloth, though with less huckster braggadocio and more patrician pomposity. But Lee’s self-portrait was also a way of hiding a reality where he deserved rather less credit for Marvel’s creativity than he demanded. For all The Mighty One’s usefulness as a safety valve and meta-commentary, the picture his stories painted of the Nerve Centre was just as fictional. As 2000AD became an institution, its staff understood that Tharg concealed as much as he revealed.

One thing Tharg no longer concealed by then was the identities of the people making the comic. Whether it was Kevin O’Neill’s plan when he introduced the creator robots in this Tharg story I don’t know, but the conceit that the comic is being produced by mechanical hands gave him the excuse to smuggle artist, writer and letterer credits into the comic. In Prog 36 readers opening the comic to read new story Inferno saw the first “2000AD Credit Card” telling them who was responsible for it.

It’s hard to overstate what a big deal this was, and there’s some dispute as to whether management just didn’t notice until the credit cards had been running for a few weeks, or whether they actually believed O’Neill’s claim that this was just a joke based on the idea of robots making the comic. Either way, the credits stayed, opening up 2000AD to readers and organised fandom in a way no British comic ever had been. The repercussions of this last to this day. A British comic now existed that people could make their name on.

HOW TO READ IT: “Tharg And The Intruder” is reprinted in The Complete Future Shocks Vol.1, which also contains most of what I’m writing about next time too. As ever, available on the 2000AD webshop.

RECOMMENDED? It’s great fun, though it’s not worth the price of the collection. Most Tharg strips are by nature not built to last but if you get the chance, it’s 3 pages of Kevin O’Neill enjoying himself and that’s always a good time.

NEXT PROG: With this kind of lead-in I’m sure the Future Shocks are going to be brilliant.