Well, I’m Just A Modern Guy: M.A.C.H. 1

This is another episode of DISCOURSE 2000, my story-by-story blog about British comic 2000AD. It contains spoilers for this and other strips.

WHICH THRILL? The power of computerised acupuncture and a computer in his brain turns British secret agent John Probe into the super-spy MACH 1

NEEDLES AND THE DAMAGE DONE

“Science fiction doesn’t sell” was – according to 2000AD’s second editor Kelvin Gosnell – received wisdom at IPC when 2000AD was conceived. That was one reason Dan Dare showed up as a bet-hedging exercise. And the particular bet management were keen to hedge – the one that got 2000AD approved in the first place – also drove the choice of 2000AD’s last two launch stories. 

The comic was based on a gamble that a wave of popular sci-fi films and TV would give a futuristic paper a decent shot at survival, at least for a couple of years. Gosnell, a keen young IPC staffer and SF fan, wrote a memo in late 1975 outlining this wave – the then-forthcoming Close Encounters and Star Wars movies, existing SF films like Rollerball, and the model for MACH 1: TV hit The Six Million Dollar Man, which existed in an intersection between sci-fi and secret agent capers. 2000AD’s target audience of kids knew Steve Austin and liked Steve Austin. When IPC greenlit a sci-fi mag, a British Steve Austin was an obvious move.

This makes MACH 1 the most traditional strip in the launch Prog. Traditional not just in the sense that any kid reading it would know instantly what they were getting, but because strips thinly based on other media properties – “dead cribs” in office parlance – were a British comics mainstay. One Eyed Jack, John Wagner’s Valiant strip about a New York cop, is a filed-off Dirty Harry. The Leopard From Lime Street, token adventure strip in humour comic Buster, was England’s Spider-Man. And any reader of Action could have named the spawning ground of notorious killer shark Hook Jaw.

Dead cribs weren’t an attempt to be sly. The familiarity was the point, like the just-different-enough branding on the Aldi versions of Penguin biscuits. A dead crib from a top action film gave kids something they wanted, but couldn’t get – probably the majority of Action’s readers were too young to see Jaws, and even if they did get in, 90 minutes of shark action might only leave them wanting more. Hook Jaw filled a need, and let creators be inventive in coming up with ways to extend and twist the source material – in Hook Jaw’s case, making the shark win. But MACH 1 is on shakier ground here – kids could see the Six Million Dollar Man any week it was on. What kind of alternative could 2000AD provide?

In the beginning they hardly needed one. This kind of “we have X at home” strip development had a lot of advantages. For a start it took the readers far less time to get on board. MACH 1’s gesture at differentiation is ludicrous – “computerised acupuncture”, you say? – but it doesn’t matter a bit. John Probe, the Man Activated by Compu-puncture Hyperpower, gets no background, no past and no real introduction, because the readers are fully aware of who he is and want to get to the violence. He’s a jaw, a hairline and a pair of hyper-powered fists. And predictably MACH 1, not Dan Dare, became the first reader favourite – the kids were much more familiar with the Bionic Man than with the hero of Spacefleet.

A borrowed concept also makes things simpler for the writers, and when you look at the credits for the early MACH 1 strips it’s a merry-go-round of creators. Pat Mills, as usual, sets the tone, but unlike his handover of Invasion! to a single writer, MACH 1 gets passed around, mostly to a set of writers with little or no wider 2000AD association – Peter Harris, Roy Preston, Robert Flynn, and others. This makes it very hard for MACH 1 to build or sustain any kind of identity, as there’s no obvious brief other than to do a British Six Million Dollar Man story, and no real sense of what that even is beyond “a bit grittier”. It’s not that the writers don’t go at their job with gusto – and the editorial hand of Mills is very evident, injecting quite ordinary spy stories with a shot of gonzo melodrama – but there’s no way of disguising how repetitive the series quickly becomes.

Like Flesh, it’s useful to contrast MACH 1 with its most obvious model from Action, the hard-as-nails spy series Dredger. Dredger has no superhuman powers beyond toughness and his trusty Magnum, and like Bill Savage in Invasion! he gets to show off how hard he is by contrast with a posher but feebler alternative, Etonian agent Simon Breed. But structurally Dredger and MACH 1 stories are very similar – one-episode stories of a spy mission with lashings of violence. But while it’s just as formulaic, Dredger is a much more impressive comic. The lack of space for storytelling, and the lack of Hyper-Power as a get-out-of-jail card, forces writers for Dredger to be much more inventive, often beginning each story with Dredger and Breed in an impossible situation and needing to be ingenious in its resolution. MACH 1 tries the same trick on occasion but there’s a lot more linear plotting too – Probe gets briefed; Probe flies in; Probe beats the threat up. And Dredger has a second mode it works in – street-level danger – which MACH 1 can’t match and takes time to find its equivalent of.

BRITS ABROAD

If MACH 1 stands out for anything, it’s as the most nationalist thing in early 2000AD – no mean feat in a comic with Invasion! But it’s inevitable from the premise. For a done-in-one secret agent series to work you need a Britain that’s at constant, deadly, weekly risk. MACH 1 is the last line of defence in a world whose threat level is permanently maxed out. Some of the enemies and rivals are real countries – China and Japan – others are invented. After John Sanders nixed the Russian involvement in Invasion!, it’s not surprising to find them with an identity crisis here. They flicker between themselves and anonymised “Eastern forces” (who still say “Niet! Niet!” when MACH 1 comes to call). The Middle East is represented by “Irania” and “Turkostan”. This latter boasts a holy place called the “Black Mosque” in a capital city called, and here the illusion is badly strained, Macca.

John Probe’s approach on his grand tour of exotic locations is very consistent. In his gung-ho defence of British interests he’s the least secret of agents; most of his plans begin and end with smashing stuff up. Allies surface occasionally, particularly the Americans, who are (of course) overconfident and unreliable. With contemporary European threats off the table, his time is often taken up by assorted terrorists, who tend to have German names and accents. It’s a real shock when in one story we meet the “British Mining Corporation” who are obvious crooks, haw-hawing over their exploitation of “the natives” on a Pacific Island, in a story which is otherwise an outing for the “Japanese holdout” trope.

That mission leaves a “bad taste” in John Probe’s mouth, but this tacit admission that maybe British interests aren’t always virtuous is as bold as early MACH 1 gets. Even as the one contemporary 2000AD strip, it stays scrupulously away from anything that might feel like current British politics or foreign policy. Even Marvel’s Captain Britain, as unrecognisable a UK-set story as ever saw print, managed to get a Silver Jubilee story in, albeit one in which the Queen is mind-controlled to declare war on an African former colony. Colonialist fallout in Africa is another hot topic MACH 1 entirely avoids, though it’s hard to see this as a loss. Kelvin Gosnell alleged in one interview that IPC suggested a story about an African leader who was half-gorilla, which mercifully never got anywhere near print.

Still, if you do want casual racism in early 2000AD, MACH 1 is the strip you’re after – a weird Bermuda Triangle story features a mad scientist with “slant-eyed” troops, who John Probe guns down once their master is defeated. From a craft perspective, MACH 1 stories tend to use their five pages effectively, cramming in as many short action sequences and familiar visual elements as possible. And in a globe-trotting context, “familiar visual elements” means “a parade of cliches”. This can make for grim reading. One episode is an orientalist bingo card of superstitious desert tribes, corrupt sheikhs, and topless women in harem pants facing the lash. Its name in the 2000AD database is simply “Arab Story”.

As Probe thwarts plot after plot, and his cranial computer meticulously counts off all the bits of real-world military hardware the stories use, I start to get a nagging feeling that all this isn’t, well, isn’t very 2000AD. One thing about 2000AD, as its identity gradually emerges over the course of its first three years, is how that identity is defined as much by the stories that don’t fit as the ones that do. Not fitting isn’t always a reflection on quality – there are some stories which are so good at being “not 2000AD” that they change what the comic can be. On one hand it’s silly to talk about a strip in the very first Prog as not fitting 2000AD – MACH 1 is part of what defines 2000AD – but there’s a sense that whatever the nascent 2000AD vibe is, MACH 1 has it only at a surface level. The skull-cracking violence probably couldn’t surface elsewhere, but the framework would be just fine in Valiant, Lion, Battle or any of the other IPC boys’ papers. And the elements of the rough-edged 2000AD style that are there make the jingoistic tone feel sleazier and nastier.

Yes, there are hints of more interesting ideas here and there. A Mills hero thrives on not doing what he’s told, and John Probe has some of that. Early on his main foil is his onboard computer itself, a rare borrowing from US comics via a borrowed issue of Deathlok. It’s forever telling him not to save irrelevant bystanders or express emotion. This isn’t played for laughs or even as a plot element: Probe is at complete liberty to ignore its whingeing, and does so. Instead the computer is there to make Probe seem more heroic to the reader, offering a constant but powerless authority figure to give the hyper-powered finger to. It’s a useful, overused trick.

In the background, though, there’s a more convincing antagonist. Probe’s boss, Sir Denis Sharpe, does not have any of MACH 1’s best interests at heart, and the stage is set for Mills’ themes of class and resistance to authority to push through again. This bubbling conflict and resentment between management and field agents is a part of the spy genre which MACH 1’s million-dollar source material rarely if ever explored, but it’s especially important to the British spy novel. And it’s an obvious way for MACH 1 to strike out into its own territory and develop as a story. 

But for a long time – the first six months of the strip – it doesn’t go there. The many-handed, highly episodic nature of MACH 1 means these themes are far more muffled than they were in Invasion! or Flesh. Most of the time, John Probe is a generic figure, an honourable bruiser beating up a host of mostly foreign devils in stories where you’re as likely to find hackneyed stereotypes as thrill-power.

MACH DADDY

And yet, as I said, the readers loved it. This is the problematic thing about declaring that MACH 1 is somehow less 2000AD-ish than the other strips. For the first few months, before being overtaken by Judge Dredd during his “Robot Wars” story, this series was what readers most wanted 2000AD to be. Why?

The obvious similarity to a hit TV show is part of it, but MACH 1 was also a clear example of the “Sweeney strip” concept I talked about in the Invasion! entry – a story that revolved around its main character’s street-level toughness and no-nonsense approach to problems. John Probe’s superhuman, literal hardness, and the done-in-one stories in which he despatches a bunch of scumbags while ignoring his nagging computer, make him an ideal lead for this sort of story, and he only falls from his perch in readers’ eyes when an even more effective Sweeney strip kicks into gear.

Back in the Invasion! post I talked briefly about how SF and the Sweeney strip are a difficult fit. In order to fit in SF elements, you almost always sacrifice some of the gritty, authentic-feeling elements that draw an audience to the strip. MACH 1 is one attempt to solve the problem – John Probe gets sent on ever more outlandish and high-octane missions, until he’s doing things like running up Everest and using the corpses of frozen mountaineers as clubs while fighting a Tibetan Army heat weapon. You might say MACH 1’s main interest now is as an index of the kind of things that turned up in late 70s comic strips, a merry-go-round of neo-pulp tropes: the Bermuda Triangle, Yetis, lost Nazi treasure, UFOs, Kung Fu.

But whatever weirdness lurks in the background, Probe always comes over like an ordinary bloke doing a tough job. He boasts at one point of his “license to kill” and his vibe is indeed more James Bond than Steve Austin. But it’s Bond as a down-to-earth, hard-bitten fighter who also happens to have superhuman strength and endurance. It’s futuristic, but it’s not a weird or conceptual or mind-expanding or world-building futuristic, it’s just a guy who can punch really hard. Because of computerised acupuncture.

And it’s a direction 2000AD could have gone in – episodic adventure paper stories mixing a Sweeney-esque toughness with fantastical plots. The strips which do that initially – Invasion!, MACH 1 and then Judge Dredd – are more popular than the ones that don’t, and it’s only Dredd’s huge success when it starts varying the formula and building out its setting that starts to shift that story’s direction and leave MACH 1 feeling more of an odd strip out, a prototype of the 2000AD template not an implementation of it.

Still, MACH 1 was popular enough to be pitched as a solo title, apparently as a pilot for a line designed to introduce US style monthly titles to the UK market. This proposal, again by Kelvin Gosnell, didn’t go anywhere – IPC were unconvinced such comics would work in Britain (the market has mostly agreed). It’s tricky to imagine what such a comic could have been like – in his early months John Probe feels like the 2000AD character least suited to any kind of extended story. The spectacular but forgettable 5-pager was his natural habitat.

RETURN OF THE MACH

Or was it? By the end of 1977, MACH 1 was starring in longer stories, ones which actually built up his world and moved wider plots forward. Pat Mills came back to the strip for a pair of thrills that began this work, ditching some of the dubious wider geopolitics and mixing widescreen action with secrets and cover-ups, finally finding a second mode the strip can work in. “Planet Killers” takes the trad MACH 1 formula and shows how good and wild “superpowered James Bond” could have been, a Thunderball-on-speed three-parter with intense, swirling Jesus Redondo art which has MACH 1 being roasted in a space shuttle’s exhaust burn and crashing it into a rogue ICBM. “UFO” goes further out, mashing Bond with Bodysnatchers in a story which rapidly shifts from small-scale horror to a full-on invasion, with MACH 1 left raging at the end by the US government’s callous cover-up of mass death.

These two are easily the best MACH 1 stories so far, and proof that the character could work at length, giving the over-the-top super-spy plots a bit of room to breathe so they don’t feel so perfunctory. But they’re also a solid example of how badly early 2000AD needed Mills, who was a master of writing stories which satisfied every week and still constantly escalated their stakes. When other people wrote longer MACH 1 stories, they immediately began to feel padded. “MACH Woman”, for instance, where the Russians get the secrets of Compu-Puncture Hyper-Power and create a hot young super-agent to murder MACH 1, is an idea the strip had to do sometime. But every beat in Alan Hebden’s story is rote; a Bond girl riff that, in a comic for tweenage boys, has to be sparklessly chaste. 2000AD could paint the comic red when it came to violence, but sex was absolutely off-limits, and Probe’s womanising was limited to the odd off-duty speedboat ride. In any case, death is a standard outcome for Probe’s one-off support cast; Tanya may instantly defect, and later die in Probe’s arms, but it has no more weight than any other grumpy conclusion.

Through all these later stories, though, we’ve been getting reminders that Probe’s superior, Denis Sharpe, is not to be trusted, and as 1977 ends this idea brings MACH 1’s adventures to a temporary climax. There’s a clever idea here, as we’ve been teased with the notion that MACH 1 will inevitably be replaced by a superior MACH 2 model. But what we actually find out is that there’s a MACH 0, warped by the treatment and caged up in a government facility with only The Muppet Show for company. Discovering and helping Zero is the cue for Probe to finally break with Sharpe, and there, for now, we leave him. “MACH Zero” is a good story, partly because they commissioned Flesh’s beast master Ramon Sola to draw it, so the action scenes have an anatomy-defying ferocity that’s unusual for the strip. But even though Sharpe’s heel turn has been teased from the outset, it still feels a little sudden, partly because Sharpe has never become an actual character, just a central-casting bad boss.

Like the Mills stories, this is another answer to the question of “what do we do with this strip?”. And it works to an extent – MACH 1 has a direction now. But Mills’ stories grew out of the existing strip – they were a bigger, better version of ordinary MACH 1 adventures. In a different comic, John Probe could have enjoyed a happy run punching UFOs and wrestling outside space shuttles with the occasional bit of fist-shaking to underline that he was doing it on sufferance. Hebden’s stories deliberately cut that possibility off, moving MACH 1 to its built-in destination of John Probe fighting his government, not working with it. As we’ll see again and again in 2000AD, once you pull this lever and torch a strip’s status quo, you have two options: find something that works to replace it, or let it end. The choice MACH 1 makes will help define the comic in ways his actual adventures never did.

WHERE TO READ IT: Mach 1’s adventures are collected in two volumes, available at the 2000AD Webshop – this post includes stories up to the midway point of the second one.

RECOMMENDED? Not really, though there’s a step up when you get to the longer stories. “Planet Killers”, “UFO” and “MACH Zero” are the strip at its best, expanding on the more formulaic, episodic early stories.

NEXT PROG: The last of the original five 2000AD strips, and a chance to ask – SPORT! Huh! What is it good for? It’s HARLEM HEROES!

M.A.C.H.1 and 2000AD (c) Rebellion