I Got Everything It Takes To Be Your Everlasting Friend: WALTER THE WOBOT

This is an entry in my year-by-year, story-by-story series about 2000AD, Discourse 2000. Contains spoilers (I guess) for the solo Walter strips and perhaps other things.

Which Thrill?: Walter is a robot domestic servant of Judge Dredd with an intense devotion to Dredd and a speech impediment. These are his solo adventures.

NOT THE DWOID YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

The first of 2000AD’s experiments with a short half- or one-page comedy strip was Bonjo From Beyond The Stars, a Kevin O’Neill creation that ran on the editorial page at the end of 1977. Bonjo told the story of a rampaging space monster who landed in China and chomped his way through a few dubious stereotypes before being despatched, unmourned, by Tharg himself. It sits on the lists of early stories, an incongruous placing when you actually read it as it’s mostly a way of filling space if there weren’t enough reader letters or adverts.

This sort of strip was a UK comics standard. A three- or four-panel gag story helped when the editorial content ran short and it gave the letters page a little more personality. 2000AD’s combination of a charismatic editor figure in Tharg and genuine reader enthusiasm meant the comic had less of a need for filler like this, and Bonjo is one more footnote from the early days.

But there was nothing about 2000AD’s format or audience that meant a short-format comedy strip couldn’t work. As the comic got older, it became obvious that its readership was getting older with it, but in 1978 the Prog was still very much pitched at 8-12 year olds, and IPC’s hope and expectation was that they’d cross gradually over from comics like Whizzer & Chips and Buster, aimed at kids a little younger than that. Single page joke strips were the bread and butter of that format, something all younger 2000AD readers would be familiar and comfortable with. Why not run one in 2000AD?

At the start of 1978, the editors had their chance. 2000AD had four pages of colour art each week – the cover, the centre pages (at this point occupied by Judge Dredd) and the back cover. The back cover was generally used for full-page pin-ups or any colour advertising IPC had managed to sell. But Kelvin Gosnell’s philosophy as editor was to maximise the strip pages in each Prog – it’s why he started Dan Dare on the cover for a while. It made sense to also run a strip on the back, which would be a one-pager by necessity, as you wouldn’t know in advance whether you needed it in a given prog. 

There was only one real candidate for the star of such a strip, the comedy sidekick of 2000AD’s breakout character. When Walter The Wobot’s solo page launched, he was at the height of his comic powers in the Dredd strip, accompanying the Judge on his mission to Luna-1, and acting as a familiar face (or viewscreen) in a story which lacked any kind of foil or supporting cast beyond anonymous fellow judges. In that first year of Dredd, Walter had become a fixture, apparently as important to the strip as Mega-City One itself. Judge Dredd even seemed to be warming to the little guy.

It was not to be, and Walter’s short-lived solo strip goes some way to explain why. Walter is in possession of two jokes, admittedly more than some comedy sidekicks manage. He has a speech impediment – he’s a Wobot, his employer is Judge Dwedd, and so on. And he is obsequiously loyal to Dredd, to the point of making himself an enormous pest in any main strip story he appears in.

But both these jokes only work in the Dredd strip itself. The speech impediment can be used to undercut dramatic situations and puncture Walter’s (and the strip’s) self-importance – the bandits of Luna-1 are a “wuff bweed”, for instance. And the devotion to Dredd is a way of creating story hooks as well as occasionally providing a punchline to a Walter-centric story. Neither of Walter’s gimmicks suggest much in the way of solo mirth or adventure, and the “Fwiend Of Dwedd” strip bears that out. The main thing it gives us – and it’s certainly a plus – is ten pages of Brian Bolland art we otherwise wouldn’t get to enjoy, especially as he gets to draw more of the freaky, mutated monster-men he would have fun with in the Cursed Earth stories.

It’s telling, though, that both of the longer Walter solo stories – five whole one-page parts apiece – rely on plots that the Dredd strip had already used. Walter is suspected of a crime; Walter is kidnapped. Yes, this time he doesn’t have Dredd to sort things out, and history is repeating itself first as farce and second as even bigger farce, but it does accurately suggest that there are a finite number of Walter The Wobot stories to tell, and that John Wagner had already used the main ones.

The two other main uses of Walter in Judge Dredd itself are for him to do something unusually idiotic or unusually heroic. Both have rich potential – the funniest Walter story is the early Dredd in which the robot has been watching an illegal game show and yells encouragement to the contestants even as Dredd uses him to bust the operation. And, as we’ll see, the fact of his general ineptitude makes him a tempting character to offer help at moments of great drama – an ironic trope John Wagner (and later Alan Grant) particularly enjoy.

So one way to make a weekly one-page Walter strip work might have been to simply tell short, silly Dredd stories with Walter as the main character, like a Wobot-centric version of the eventual Dredd newspaper strip. But they mostly didn’t take this route, perhaps because the writers realised it could ultimately undermine Dredd himself, but also because the ongoing Cursed Earth story was shifting the mode of Judge Dredd, showing that the strip could work with more or less serious characters to bounce the Judge off, even if Spikes Harvey Rotten and Tweak only stick around for a single storyline. It was another way of answering the question Walter demands we ask: does Judge Dredd need a supporting cast?

With hindsight, a strange thing about the Dredd strip is that it takes a few years for them to hit on the obvious answer – Dredd’s natural supporting cast are his colleagues in Justice Department. The first two years of the strip find Dredd paired with a set of grotesques, from Walter and Maria through Spikes and Max Normal and onto Fergee. These are often great characters, and fine foils for Dredd’s inflexibility, but given how central Dredd’s relationships with other Judges become to the strip it gives the early years a slightly hollow feeling, where Dredd is Dredd but the context he operates in doesn’t quite hold together yet.

The lack of companion colleagues also marks Dredd as a departure from the standard template for a Millsian tough guy hero. Bill Savage had Peter Silk; Dredger had Simon Breed; even MACH 1 had the computer in his head, but Dredd is partner-less. It’s a function of the way Dredd inverts the usual set-up. Silk, Breed and the computer exist to demonstrate how the protagonist breaks rules – they’re the establishment voice telling a man like Bill Savage “no, you can’t do that”, so the reader cheers all the more when yes, he can. 

But Dredd is the rules. He has all the ingenuity and ruthlessness of a character like Dredger or One Eyed Jack, but none of their desire to transgress, which makes it hard for that kind of strait-laced foil to work opposite him. So instead the early supporting characters – Walter and Maria, for instance – work to humanise him, creating a funny domestic context as a contrast to the iron justice Dredd spends most of the strip dispensing.

The Cursed Earth makes that harder to sustain: it gives us a Dredd whose will to survive and to complete his mission takes him somewhere beyond human. It’s close to impossible to imagine the man who crawls through Death Valley at the end of that story returning to getting nagged by Maria and having Walter mend his underwear. Ultimately it opens up a much richer lode of characterisation for the strip – how do people react to, and work with, a man like Dredd?

The Judge Dredd strip was quickly outgrowing the original need for a  “comic sidekick” role, but that insight – that Dredd’s stoney face needed a balancing smile – was still a solid one. The role simply broadened, to encompass Mega-City One itself. The city, in all its ungovernable hilarity, became Dredd’s foil; its perps as likely to feed Dredd gags as threaten his life. Walter’s job of humanising Dredd became pointless once Mills, Wagner and others realised that the thing to do with Dredd was to make him even less human but give him a whole world of Walters to contend with.

A BIT OF FUN

One of the great might-have-beens of 2000AD was the attempt by its editors to run a strip by the great Ken Reid, IPC humour title stalwart and the creator of characters like Faceache, a boy who can “scrunge” his features into repulsively contorted shapes. Reid proposed a strip for an older audience, about a man trying repeatedly to kill himself each week but failing. It would have taken his cartooning into even more distorted and disgusting realms but it was apparently nixed by higher-ups: not totally surprising, given the premise. As well as being a few years ahead of where 2000AD actually was, the Reid story reminds me of the final and main reason Walter The Wobot failed to catch on. It just wasn’t good enough.

Single page gag cartooning is a distinctive skill. Its masters, like Reid or Leo Baxendale or the greats of Viz magazine, understand the structure of a page and how to land jokes visually in a way that’s very hard for an artist used to longer strips to adapt to. Brian Bolland’s art for Walter’s strip is lovely, of course, but he was an artist whose best work was usually the visually stunning single image. The splash pages of his Dredd stories, or the later covers he did for Landau’s Eagle Comics US reprints, are magnificent; so are the moments when he uses the six-page canvas to its fullest and pauses the action for a dynamic half-page panel. But none of these make him a great choice for a single-page strip, especially when the scripts give him nothing funny to work with.

So Bolland ends up being both the reason Walter The Wobot is worth glancing at but also, ironically, a big part of why it doesn’t reward much attention. There were ways to do a single-page strip well in 2000AD, but the comic in 1978 didn’t have, and wasn’t really looking for, the kind of artists with the skills to pull it off. Instead 2000AD was moving towards a more dramatic, big-illustration style of page design and finding creators who could run with that. While technically you could call Walter The Wobot a missed opportunity, the failure to make a single-page strip stick doesn’t register against the creative leaps this artist-driven style was enabling, starting with the adventures of Walter’s boss.

The best Walter The Wobot strips are actually the final three, which came out just before the Star Lord merger, months after the Bolland pages had run their course. They’re drawn by Brendan McCarthy, who would, years later, end up drawing 2000AD’s best single-page strip. McCarthy at this point has only hints of his style’s later wildness, but he already has a looser, more chaotic energy than Bolland which lends itself better to a gag page. And the single best Walter story is a pastiche of the perennial American comics ad for Charles Atlas, with Walter getting some fake muscles and becoming “Hewo Of The Beach”. It’s dense, ridiculous, incomprehensible to probably 80% of readers – though US comic literate fans would get it – and plainly a labour of amusement, at least, for McCarthy and writer Gary Rice. 

A couple of weeks later, on merger’s eve, Walter gets the honour of hosting the first appearance of a Star Lord character in 2000AD – Mek Quake, the stupid and sadistic demolition robot from the imminent Ro-Busters strip. (Mek Quake, aside from his regular appearances across Pat Mills’ work, has a habit of simply showing up in other strips if a joke calls for it: he’s too thick to know what continuity he’s in anyway.) Walter’s own experiment as a lead character is then mostly over – he gets a handful of one-off strips over the years, but with Judge Dredd home from the Cursed Earth he can step back, to his and perhaps the reader’s relief, into the background of Dredd’s own strip, albeit a strip that had just changed irrevocably from the buddy comedy of Luna-1.

Where To Find It: I’ve not been able to find any details of Walter’s strip being consistently wepr- I mean, reprinted. Please do let me know if that’s not the case – I don’t think it turned up in either the Dredd Case or Restricted Files, for instance.

Recommended? Not irredeemable but strictly for Bolland (or Walter!) completists.

Next Prog: It’s the big one – 2000AD’s most important story of 1978, as Pat Mills writes Dredd’s longest story to date (with a bit of copyright-busting help from his friends) and throws out almost everything about the strip so far to do it. Are there dinosaurs? Of course there are dinosaurs. It’s THE CURSED EARTH.