Minds Immeasurably Superior To Ours: ANT WARS

This is a post in Discourse 2000, the year-by-year, story-by-story look at 2000AD. Contains spoilers for Ant Wars.

WHICH THRILL?: The folly of human science unleashes a horde of giant ants – can a Brazilian army Captain and an indigenous Amazon youth possibly stop them?

DESPERATE BUT NOT SERIOUS

1978’s final shot at a B-Movie Sci-Fi story in 2000AD is the most lurid of all, a Latin American remix of previous man-eating monster yarns Flesh and Shako which borrows ideas from both and filters them through the mind of Gerry Finley-Day, a writer with a strong eye for the sensational and a rather looser grip on plot or logic. The specific inspiration for Ant Wars is generally claimed as 1954’s classic monster movie Them! but readers might have recalled a review in the 1978 Sci-Fi Special of Empire Of The Ants, a much less respectable (but much more recent) B-Movie outing starring Joan Collins. Whatever the source, someone decided ants were worth a shot.

So Finley-Day becomes the third of 2000AD’s godfathers to try his hand at a beasts-on-the-loose story. He doesn’t have the fury of Mills in Flesh or the gleefully dark outlook of Wagner in Shako, and Ant Wars doesn’t stand comparison to those stories even before you start on its more obviously troubling elements. But he does have a gung-ho pulp sensibility that’s a good fit for a deeply formulaic strip, and means Ant Wars pulls off moments of magnificent stupidity.

That formula is easy to outline. Every week or two, Captain Villa of the Brazilian army and Amazonian tribesman “Ant Eater” encounter some people who refuse to believe their story of a horde of giant mutated ants. Said horde immediately turns up and eats everyone, except the leads who kill an ant or two and get away. The story climaxes with this playing out in Rio, which the ants entirely sack, except then there’s another several weeks of formic fun as the strip plays its man-eating hits until the Star Lord merger calls a halt to it.

It’s familiar stuff from earlier strips, going back to the antics of Hook Jaw in Action. Readers enjoyed seeing fools scoff at creatures and then be vivisected by them, and Ant Wars has plenty of delightful scenes on those lines. In the strip’s single best moment, a pompous general declares the ants aren’t real just as one smashes through the window behind him. 

But what made Flesh, and particularly Shako, stand out, was a commitment to a kind of pseudo-realism. The writing implied that the rampages of Old One Eye or Shako were rooted in some kind of biological truth, as if Roger Corman and David Attenborough were collaborating on telling these stories. Part of this is that a lot of the story was told from the monster’s eye view, recasting the terror meted on humans as simple animal instinct – curiosity, hunger, and only latterly rage.

Finley-Day is a lot less interested in the documentary element of his creature feature. In the early episodes of Ant Wars the strip keeps its ants’ behaviour roughly within the bounds of the species’ encyclopaedia entry. But when the story demands the ants be smart, Finley-Day follows the story not the science. A few episodes in they start to make boats out of leaves, and by the time we get to Rio they’re hiding under the wheels of carnival floats to sneak into the city. We see a BBC cameraman filming the resulting slaughter (for Alan Whicker analogue “Alan Hacker”) as the ants destroy Rio. Then we’re told that luckily the incident has been contained and nobody in the outside world knows about it.

Ant Wars shrugs off its plot holes as easily as the ants later shrug off multiple nuclear strikes, but it’s worth pointing out that this story is unusually ludicrous even for early 2000AD, since that tallies with the rest of what we know about the strip and the editorial conditions when it ran. Ant Wars behind the scenes is best known for an incident described by Kevin O’Neill – the art director at the time – when the strip’s Spanish artist Azpiri sent over his pages for the Rio carnival episode, complete with a prominent topless dancer. O’Neill, who was pissed off with IPC management for their continued interference, chose to let it run to give his senior nemesis Bob Bartholomew conniptions. Bartholomew, apparently, didn’t even notice.

What did get O’Neill in trouble on Ant Wars was his decision an issue later to do a cover in the style of a tabloid newspaper, swapping out the usual logo and cover dress for a Sun-style headline. Bold artistically, but a branding and distribution nightmare, though as with the topless woman it was only noticed after the prog had gone to press.

In other words, Ant Wars was being produced at a time of unusual editorial looseness for 2000AD, when – as we’ll see in the Star Lord entries – relationships between staff and management were on the brink of falling apart. This may also be why Finley-Day’s plotting wasn’t better reined in. And I wonder if it may even explain some of what’s going on with “Ant Eater”.

RIDICULE IS NOTHING TO BE SCARED OF

In terms of the strip’s actual action, “Ant Eater” is plainly the hero of Ant Wars – he appears on the story’s introductory cover, a young Amazonian native defiantly holding a spear as a huge ant looms above him and the world. He is also easily the most competent human in the strip when it comes to fighting the ants. What stands out when you read it, though, is his treatment by the other characters in the strip.

Our other protagonist, Captain Villa, is grotesquely racist toward Ant Eater – he’s the one who gives the boy his name, based on his using ants as a food source, and at first constantly calls him disgusting, mocking his lack of “civilized” behaviour. Villa’s attitudes are not unusual – in fact almost every white South American in the story shows equal contempt for Ant Eater. By the end of the story, Villa has undergone a clear change of heart – he asks after Ant Eater when the two are hospitalised, intervenes to rescue him, and shares a heroic last stand against the ants.

But what stands out for a modern reader is that at no point does Villa ever admit he was mistaken about Ant Eater, let alone apologise or even treat him as much of a person. It’s impossible to imagine a writer doing this kind of plotline now without a beat where Ant Eater tells Villa, or is asked, his actual name, for instance; in Ant Wars we never learn it. It’s worth remembering this storyline was running simultaneously with the Tweak plot in Judge Dredd, which is absolutely explicit that Spikes Harvey Rotten’s very similar prejudices – even unto Tweak’s choice of diet – are stupid. And while Ant Eater gradually gets more articulate as the strip progresses he never graduates to becoming the point of view character in the way Buck Dollar – his closest equivalent in Shako – eventually does. The narrative constantly introduces him as “semi-civilized”, an “Indian” or a “savage”. Which leaves tricky questions about Ant Wars’ actual relationship with its characters’ racism.

There’s no question the reader is meant to think Villa’s racism is wrong – it’s so prominent, and so outrageous, that it’s clearly a major plot point. But as the story progresses, I get the sense that racism is wrong not because it’s morally or ethically wrong, but because it makes the efforts to fight the giant ants less effective. Ant Eater is simply much better at ant-slaying than Villa, and obviously more intelligent (as in any creature-feature strip, most of the human characters are enjoyably stupid). But the strip often takes the position that it’s not his intelligence that makes him effective against the ants, it’s his deeper understanding of them granted by his “semi-civilized” status and jungle knowledge. “Don’t be prejudiced against ‘savages’: they might know stuff” is the lesson – if lesson there is – of Ant Wars.

And even Ant Eater’s effectiveness is played for irony – Finley-Day enjoys set-ups where the boy does something obviously ‘uncivilized’, like tasting petrol, only for it to be the key to defeating that week’s batch of ants. Ant Eater is a rung below even a “noble savage” stereotype like Buck Dollar, who is able to take on Shako because he is somehow more deeply in touch with the land the bear dwells in. He’s an ignoble savage whose apparent clowning is flipped into plot resolution. For all that Ant Wars is a romp, it’s also a deeply uncomfortable read in places, a story which explicitly positions racism as bad while constantly indulging in it.

Wrapped around the problem of Ant Eater is a whole other set of stereotypes, less difficult to deal with but emblematic of 2000AD’s relationship with the foreign. Ant Wars is wholly set in South America, which means Finley-Day gets to tick boxes on a list of “South American stuff” for the ants to munch through, and have everyone call each other “amigo”. We see Rio carnival! Gauchos! Football fans, since it’s a World Cup year (the football fans, to be fair, are Scottish, and their grim fate is one of the most fondly-remembered elements of the strip). My favourite of all these is a set of gun-toting rebels led by the beret-clad “Gavara”: “the ants are not my enemy!” he declares. But like the government he hates, he too refuses to take the ant threat seriously until it’s too late.

Initially I wondered if the South American setting was because the editors knew the strip would be using Argentine and Brazilian artists, as, like most makeweight 2000AD and Star Lord strips of this era the art was sourced via an agency for overseas creators. But no – all four of the artists on Ant Wars are Spanish. The most notable is Azpiri, he of the topless carnival dancer and a feathery style a bit like Ian Gibson’s: he went on to a long association with Heavy Metal where he could (and did) draw boobs to his heart’s content. 

Neither he, launch artist Jose Luis Ferrer, or the two creators who sign on for a fill-in episode apiece do anything more or less than a professional job. But once you’ve seen one ant, it turns out you’ve seen them all, and while the artists have the typical Spanish school flair for expressive characters and fluid action, even their Queen Ants lack menace (Kevin O’Neill’s cover for one Prog has a sense of grotesquerie the actual story could have handily used). It’s another way this strip can’t match Flesh or Shako, both of which benefited hugely from getting Ramon Sola on board to call forth the gory spirit of their starring beasts.

Ultimately the South American setting allows Finley-Day to do the kind of episodic routines he wants – the continent has the right balance of wilderness and city to make a monster threat from the interior work. But as we’ll see repeatedly, early 2000AD has a curious affinity for South America, and particularly for characters where the writers can use a kind of Speedy Gonzalez cartoon accent. (Ant Wars ees spared from thees) The only other nationality which gets this sort of repeated treatment are Japanese characters. Ant Wars isn’t the most egregious example of 2000AD’s love of stereotyping – which is certainly not evenly shared across every writer – but it feels like a good place to start thinking about it.

The simplest explanation is that, for all that 2000AD is genuinely a groundbreaking comic, it’s also a British one, and Britain in the 1970s was a more insular place than it even is now, very enamoured of comedy characters whose defining trait was that they were foreign. Most of 2000AD’s Mexican and Spanish comic relief sits downstream of Fawlty Towers’ Manuel, for instance (and often cartooning skill elevates them in the same way Andrew Sachs’ physical performance elevates the Manuel character). When you’re cranking out stories to a weekly deadline, you’re likely to reach for easy material sometimes, and hot-blooded Mexicans and geeky Japanese tourists are certainly that.

It is interesting to me, though, that the nationalities 2000AD reaches for most often as a source of comedy in its first decade are the ones with limited historical connection to Britain. The writers and editors are not tapping into the kinds of racist comedy that were rife and controversial in 1970s Britain, the ones aimed at the significant minority populations who actually lived here. IPC titles – 2000AD included – tended to downplay or ignore the existing diversity of Britain, and future strips like Skizz which make a point of it are startling because of that. But they were also careful not to use Black or South Asian people for laughs. The comedy Mexican seemed a safer way to get mileage from ethnic humour, and like most things in 2000AD that have aged terribly, it wasn’t expected to age at all.

Nor was the comic itself. The structure of Ant Wars is unusual – it has a very clear ending 9-10 episodes in with the ant takeover of Rio and our heroes’ destruction of the Queen, but then it just keeps going for another six weeks (more Queens unhelpfully turn up). I’d speculate Finley Day was asked to extend the series and produce more scripts, especially as the false climax happens in the progs that were in preparation when John Sanders of IPC made his final decision on the fate of 2000AD and Star Lord.

Once the merger date was fixed, the clock could run out on Ant Wars, which bows out with the deaths of Villa and Ant Eater and one final ludicrous contrivance: everyone happily agrees to cover up a US nuclear strike on the Andes. Ant Wars isn’t quite the last hurrah of the creature rampage story – Kelvin Gosnell had a sequel to Flesh ready to take its place – but it’s the end of the standalone B-Movie strips which characterise the Gosnell-Landau editorial era and its conception of science fiction.

These had not been a success, and while no comic with The Cursed Earth in could be bad, it’s hard to agree with Pat Mills’ judgement that this was a minor golden era for 2000AD. The obvious and correct impression you get from 2000AD and Star Lord for most of summer 1978 is of a set of creators stretched desperately thin and commissioning second- or third-rate material to try and get their titles out of the door. What’s more, this flailing around was happening just as the predicted sci-fi craze finally arrived, leaving 2000AD running stories riffing on a godawful Joan Collins film as the kids were going mad for droids, aliens, and lightsabers.

According to John Sanders, writing with extensive hindsight, it was only his faith in the potential of 2000AD that saved the comic: Starlord was supposedly selling better, and in any case seemed much more in tune with the new spirit of the sci-fi age. But what was the background to Sanders’ decision? To answer that I’m going to try and reconstruct the story of Star Lord, and the most chaotic summer in 2000AD’s history.

HOW TO READ IT: Ant Wars has its own collection from Rebellion, which also collects 2005’s Judge Dredd semi-sequel Zancudo, that I haven’t read.

RECOMMENDED?: I think this is a bit of a “you had to be there” one – it’s fondly remembered and it’s better than a lot of the post-launch pre-merger crop but the Ant Eater material is tough going.

NEXT PROG: Before we take a detour into the world of Star Lord it’s time to see what’s in Tharg’s alien bran tub as I rank 1978’s FUTURE SHOCKS from worst to best.