I Will Not Be Treated As Property: M.A.C.H. 1 ’78 / M.A.C.H. ZERO

This is an entry in Discourse 2000, my story-by-story, year-by-year look at 2000AD. Contains spoilers for both MACH 1 and MACH Zero.

Which Thrills? MACH 1 is the final adventures of super-spy John Probe. MACH Zero is the story of a failed prototype, the childlike colossus Zero.

NO MORE HEROES ANYMORE

Dan Dare moved to headline his own comic. Flesh, Harlem Heroes and Invasion all got sequels or reboots in future decades. Dredd is Dredd. Of 2000AD’s original roster, only the Man Activated by Compu-Puncture Hyperpower never got a straight, non-parodic revival. In early 1978, acting editor Nick Landau took the decision to kill off John Probe aka MACH 1, and the decision has stuck. While I’m reaching it after the grand guignol massacre endings of Inferno and Dan Dare, MACH 1’s death came first, and left the most impression. These things can really matter to a kid. I was just the right age, for instance, to be left in absolute shock by the ending of Blake’s 7, everything I imagined I knew about stories and endings dying in a circle of unseen gunfire. Maybe the 8 year olds of 1978 had a similar reaction to “The Final Encounter”. The fact of his ending – and the fact he never came back – is in the end the most striking thing about MACH 1.

That includes the actual story, though. The death of MACH 1 sums up this phase of 2000AD: a decision that’s very bold as a concept – killing off the character that used to be the readers’ favourite – and then on the page feels chaotic and anticlimactic, as the strip veers away from a direction it’s been setting up. MACH 1’s adventures have gradually moved from a story with a very clear and repetitive status quo – John Probe is a violent super-Bond – to one where the motor of the plot is a gradual collapse of that premise. We’ve learned that his boss, Sir Denis Sharpe, is not to be trusted, and that the MACH programme has destroyed the mind of its previous test subject, the hulking MACH Zero. The 1978 stories pick up with a dissipated Probe being hauled back to base after an attempt to quit, where he’s informed that if he fails to go on Sharpe’s missions he will die.

But then – after a strange story in which MACH 1 and a dolphin track down a missing agent (called Robert Peel!) who’s been turned into a merman – Nick Landau raises the stakes even higher. He writes a story where Probe realises that his memories of who he was before the MACH process are missing. When he tracks Sharpe down to solve this mystery he discovers his own replacement, the entirely robotic MACH 2, who almost kills him. “Next Prog: The Final Encounter”, we’re promised, and the reader might be forgiven for knowing what’s coming up. A rematch with MACH 2, the secrets of Sharpe, the MACH project and Probe’s origin revealed, and (if we’ve been reading the increasingly ominous tone correctly) a heroic death.

The death, at least, we get. Pat Mills’ return to his creation opens with John Probe’s funeral, and a heated discussion over whether the man died a hero or a traitor. But the actual story of MACH 1’s final mission is nothing readers might have anticipated. If anything it follows up on Mills’ earlier MACH 1 “UFO” storyline, tying the fates of John Probe and Denis Sharpe into a riff on Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, with Probe sacrificing his life to protect a peace loving alien from the British army and allow him to get home.

The timing of this was as little a coincidence as Dan Dare’s fight with the Starslayer Empire. The final episode of MACH 1 appeared in a Prog with a cover dominated by the single word “UFO”, promising readers’ reports of their own close encounters. “The Final Encounter” had begun a month after Spielberg’s film opened in the UK. MACH 1 was to die as he had lived, a useful framework for cribs of material the readers might be excited about.

The authorities in Close Encounters were secretive but ultimately benign; a perspective highly unlikely to make its way into a Pat Mills story. As with The Visible Man, the powers that be in MACH 1 are mostly concerned with experimenting on the unknown and exploiting it – Fred the alien is the object of Denis Sharpe’s last power grab. Rescuing him gives John Probe – in the final analysis a standard action hero – something to do in the story, and Sharpe is killed off by an accidental shot from one of his own men, taking Probe’s secrets with him. MACH 2 and all that stuff about lost memories? Simply unresolved. The MACH 1 file is closed.

I DID IT M.A.C.H. WAY

In Thrill Power Overload, Nick Landau gives a simple reason for the demise of John Probe: the editorial team hated him and thought the strip was boring. While MACH 1 had actually improved a lot since its launch – the struggle between Probe and his handlers gave the series a much needed throughline and sense of momentum – it’s not too hard for the modern reader to sympathise with Landau here. But it doesn’t explain why Landau himself took pains to set up a final mystery and conflict which the story threw away a few weeks later.

There’s every chance that the hurried conclusion to MACH 1 is simply down to the overall chaos of 2000AD at this point, with IPC’s attention on launching Starlord and Misty, stories shuffling around and Landau trying to get Judge Dredd episodes out of a very overworked Mills. “The Final Encounter” reads like a story that’s doing no more than the job asked of it – there’s none of the crackle and anger of The Visible Man, let alone the fever pitch thrill-power of The Cursed Earth. So it’s very possible Mills simply wasn’t interested in the plot points Landau had set up, or hadn’t taken them on board.

But it’s also possible that the entire “mystery” of John Probe was nothing of the sort. When Probe realises he has no memory or background, that’s as much a commentary on the previous fifty episodes of MACH 1 as a hook for a future story. No writer has ever thought to give John Probe a history or a personality, because he never needed one. He isn’t some kind of mind-wiped tragic figure or a man with buried secrets; he’s a cypher, by far the least personally interesting of any early 2000AD hero. As Sharpe taunts him, perhaps there never was a John Probe. Landau isn’t setting up a final MACH 1 story as much as commenting on the impossibility of making an interesting one. The missions keep coming, until they don’t. What other ending could there be?

The funeral of John Probe is also a symbolic laying to rest of the initial phase of 2000AD, the “sweeney-fi” approach pioneered by Mills of hard-man, anti-authoritarian heroes in the Action style. Brits putting the boot in and getting the job done. Like all successful 2000AD approaches, it left a mark on the comic, became a reference point future writers and editors could riff on when the Prog needed a shot of aggro. And certainly Mills has never tired of writing heroes set on overturning the world they live in. But the nature of those worlds changed, becoming more explicitly futuristic and fantastic as 2000AD began to embrace science fiction less gingerly. In particular the lesson of Dredd’s success – that the spaces your hero moved through could be as fascinating as its characters – helped break the early reliance on contemporary, Earth-set strips in the Prog.

But while MACH 1’s story was over, the next few months saw a spin-off take his place: MACH Zero, starring the brutish MACH program prototype who got all the strength of the Compu-Puncture process but who was left a rage-driven mental wreck. Ironically given his longest story is about MACH Zero battling a flashy American import, Zero comes across as a very blatant crib of Marvel’s Hulk, down to his staccato, third-person speech patterns and child-like naivety. But unlike the Hulk, Zero has no Bruce Banner side to provide human weakness and interest. Zero’s humanity is lost, his one tie with it – the memory of his son Tommy – used only as a way for his enemies to confuse or exploit him.

In fact, both his 1978 stories – “Cousin George” and “The Suit” – feature malevolent characters who trick Zero into believing someone unrelated is a face from his past. Zero hates the man who experimented on him – Denis Sharpe – but doesn’t know that man is dead. He wants to see his son, but neither he or we meet the ‘real’ Tommy. He isn’t even aware that his foe from his first story dies at the end of it. Frank Hart in The Visible Man is an ordinary person forced to become a 2000AD protagonist; Zero is even more adrift, a hero with no aim or agency, an unwanted appendix to a cancelled strip. (Readers did not take to him – the letters page of Prog 73 is pointedly full of Earthlets demanding John Probe back).

ZERO, BUM RUSH THE SHOW

Zero’s finest solo moment in 2000AD is his very first – the cover of Prog 65, an extraordinary piece of work by Ramon Sola, whose art on Flesh and Shako had shown his aptitude for deranged, distorted violence. The elongated, wildly out of proportion form of Zero, bursting out from the cover with a typical “WUUUUUUURGH!”, promises readers a level of spectacular destruction that the strip doesn’t really match. Sola is not able to cut loose on this story as he had on his previous 2000AD encounters, as for all his bulk Zero is a kindly figure, and writer Steve MacManus is more interested in his tragedy than his brutality. 

MACH Zero is our first chance to get a handle on MacManus, one of the most important 2000AD figures, the man behind the green Tharg mask during the Prog’s early 80s golden era. The 2000AD database credits MacManus with all of the MACH Zero stories; the actual comic credits shift script duties to “Geoffrey Miller” halfway through, which may be an alias for MacManus himself or for fellow editorial staffer Roy Preston, or just conceivably a separate human entirely. Pseudonyms were common practice at IPC, where management were on the look-out for.sharp practice in commissioning stories. Whatever the case, the style’s consistent, and it’s indisputable that MacManus created the Zero character.

MacManus’ rather bittersweet memoir of his 2000AD career, The Mighty One, doesn’t spend much time on MACH Zero or on his brief writing career in general. He offers a self-deprecating account of his abilities – not a natural comics writer but good at dialogue – and MACH Zero bears him out. There’s often a snap or flow to how the characters speak, with the vagrant characters written with especial relish. But there’s also a fussy dependence on narration and an unwillingness to trust the artist to tell the story that’s characteristic of an inexperienced comic writer. As MacManus tells it, he was discouraged by the heavy rewriting of his stories – he’d penned the merman one, which to be fair does read as highly confused – and quietly dropped any scripting ambitions. In any case, his rapid promotions during the upheaval of summer 1978 made the point moot.

For all its clumsiness, though, MACH Zero is a much stranger story than John Probe’s relentless beat-em-ups. Where MACH 1 dealt with world-threatening perils, Zero’s main storyline centres on a battle between a celebrity stuntman and an army of vagrants. Zero emerges from the Thames, upstaging “Cousin George”, a celebrity American stuntman and egotist whose vanity makes this intolerable. The Hulk vs Evel Knievel is a great pitch with the makings of a solid two parter; instead the story spools out into curious places, as Zero falls in with a homeless man, Gimpy, and his vagrant friends, and helps them out against some bikers (“You BAD BOYS!” shouts the angry Zero) before being drugged and captured by George.

The rest of the story splits between Zero’s captivity and the vagrants’ activities to help him, and MacManus introduces us to a strange, and seemingly very un-2000AD-like conception. The tramps and vagrants of London are the eyes and ears of a wider underclass society, who take advantage of the ways the normal world barely notices them. They all report to “the Three”, a trinity of hobo kings with the power to enact a “Day Of Whispering” to search London for valuable information, and declare war on those who hurt their own.

This idea, and the vibe of MACH Zero in general, feels like it’s stepped back from science fiction entirely, into the world of gaslit Edwardian London, a city of the pulps and penny dreadfuls. Cousin George may look like Evel Knievel, but he acts more like a pulp villain version of Houdini, and the story nods to a futuristic setting while all its action takes place in sewers, theatres and alleys: the London of Sexton Blake or the Artful Dodger. MacManus plays up to this, giving his vagabonds rich, theatrical manners of speech, and the scenes where they call for the Day Of Whispering and for war are remarkably effective.

It’s almost unlike anything else we’ve seen in 2000AD. But when you look at the stories MACH Zero runs alongside – Chris Lowder’s stories of alien bodysnatchers and cthulhoid colonists in Dan Dare, and Pat Mills’ crashing action heroics into horror in The Cursed Earth – a pattern starts to emerge. This is 2000AD beginning to explore the weird, the pulpy and the fantastic alongside its more typical SF brief, nudging towards a kind of alien gothic where horror and fantasy are inseparable from science fiction. Aside from The Cursed Earth these experiments in weird fiction are never entirely successful, partly because both Zero and Dare are trying to shock a lacklustre strip into renewed life, but they plant a seed for much better, later work.

It’s an indication maybe of MacManus’ wider sensibility. He says in his memoir that he never saw 2000AD as a science fiction comic, rather a comic in which the traditional protagonist types of adventure fiction – the soldier, the cop, the bounty hunter – could be invigorated and explored through a sci-fi setting. We’ll see in future how well he realises these ideas as editor, but MACH Zero is early evidence of a liking for high-concept grotesquerie and a sense of a looser concept for 2000AD, a comic bound together by tone and sensibility rather than genre.

MacManus also stresses the importance for a less sure-footed writer of having great artists to work with. MACH Zero is blessed with two of the most idiosyncratic of 2000AD’s early creators, Ramon Sola and Mike Dorey. While Sola was the perfect artist for Zero’s monstrous rages, Dorey handles the bulk of the “Cousin George” story and is just as ideal for the vagabond sequences. While a lot of the Spanish and Italian 2000AD artists suffered under the indignities of cheap newsprint, their delicate linework crushed by poor reproduction, Dorey thrived on it. He was the Black Sabbath of the early Progs, smothering his compositions in a fog of greys and blacks; smoky, stippled clouds of ink begging to come off on your hands.

Dorey’s murky style suits the grotty underworld of Gimpy, Blind Barrow and their friends, making it look furtive and mysterious. His Zero is more a gentle giant than Sola’s contorted monster, sometimes drawn with an ink-free innocence amidst the rest of the story’s twilit world. The rest of Dorey’s characters are more stereotypical, mostly looking like extras from a Dickens adaptation, including an uncomfortably hook-nosed “Sneaker The Rat”. And as drawing handsome dudes is neither artist’s strong point they can’t get a consistent grip on our villain, Cousin George.

George’s role in the story is as an obvious inversion of Zero – the monster with an innocent heart meets the beloved star full of inner rot and malice. He is, naturally, a coward, never engaging Zero directly (to be fair, he knows he’d be snapped in two) and manipulating and drugging him. His death while trying to flee means MacManus needn’t push Zero into the position of sullying that innocence by killing George; the moral distance remains intact.

But it’s also interesting that MacManus chooses a show-off American to be his bad guy. It puts the spotlight on 2000AD’s attitude to America, a huge and contradictory subject. Inevitably given its most popular strip is set there, 2000AD is fascinated by America – yes, Dredd is more a mirror of British concerns than actual American culture or life, but those concerns also very much included ‘American culture’ as a thing we have to negotiate with in the UK. The comic spent most of 1978 trying to come to terms with the impact – commercial and cultural – of an American film, and the artists it recruited from fandom were steeped in US comics styles and characters.

2000AD’s anti-authoritarian side had an uneasy relationship with American pop culture. The hardman loners it loved to use as templates – like Dirty Harry or The Man With No Name – were often quintessentially American, while the forces opposing them were the class-bound, duplicitious establishment represented by Denis Sharpe. But class was only one way authority could impose itself: there was also cultural power, backed up with the enormous wealth of Hollywood. Cousin George is a good example of a particular stereotype of the ugly American – vain, greedy, and portrayed as hollow and shallow. It’s an idea of American crassness that British creators have often turned to when outmuscled in a US-dominated global marketplace – it’s at the root of the long-running (and bizarre) idea that Americans don’t “get irony”. 

George’s wealth, resources and hollow vanity are overturned by the dregs of British society – abandoned by some unspecified technological change (MACH Zero seems to take place in a more explicit near future than MACH 1 did) but able to use their wits and fellowship to take this interloper down a peg. It’s a miniature of how 2000AD came to present itself during the MacManus years – a gang of scruffy, anarchic Brits taking risks and getting away with things that other comics, particularly US imports, could not. Behind the scenes, though, the issues facing 2000AD and mainstream US creators were very similar – creative rights, art ownership and an environment biased towards not giving credit, respect or fair reward to people working on comics. This created tensions MacManus’ tenure would eventually see explode.  

MACH Zero’s next outing was more subdued – Roy Preston’s “The Suit”, a revenge of the nerds story about a mild-mannered accountant who is sealed into an exoskeleton and goes mad with power, barely features Zero and has none of the strangeness of “Cousin George”. It ends, rather sadly, with Zero back at square one, a prisoner of the authorities again. Like his predecessor/successor John Probe, he’d return for a final bow, but this was the whimpery end of the MACH programme’s run in the Prog. As those letters begging for Probe’s return showed, the strips had done their job, establishing 2000AD as a comic with an unsentimental edge, willing to kill off its stars when their stories no longer sparked thrills.

How To Read It: Both the final MACH 1 stories and the complete run of MACH Zero show up in Close Encounters, the second MACH 1 collection from Rebellion.

Recommended? MACH Zero is a strange and mostly forgotten story, presented in a way that’s unusual for early 2000AD. It’s not completely successful but it’s worth reading. The final stories of MACH 1 aren’t terrible but are of mostly historical interest.

Next Prog: We’re back to Mega-City One at last for Judge Dr- ah no, wait, for the first ever Judge Dredd spin-off strip, starring beloved sidekick Walter The Wobot! Does 2000AD need comedy strips? Does Dredd need a supporting cast? We’ll be answering these questions and more!