2000AD Year One - 1977 in review

2000AD Progs 1-45
2000AD Annual 1978
2000AD Summer Special 1977

Appearances:
ProgsExtr Tot Covers
MACH 1 45 2 47 3
INVASION 45 2 47 -
JUDGE DREDD 44 2 46 4
DAN DARE 41 2 43 6
HARLEM HEROES37 2 39 1
FLESH 19 2 21 4
SHAKO 16 1 17 -
BONJO FROM       5      -       5
FUTURE SHOCKS 18 1 19 -

It's fair to say that 2000AD in its formative stages was rather different from the beast it evolved into once it hit its stride. For a start, it is clearly pitched at a much younger and less sophisticated age group than it would be by, say, 1980, and certainly by 1990. Stories are much faster paced, less nuanced, preoccupied with action and incident rather than character or subtlety. Not that I'm saying the majority of later 2000AD is any of these things either of course, but it never feels quite as disposable and slap dash again as it did in this first year. That is not to say that it is necessarily inferior - by the time we reach the mid-1990s I'll be enduring some really execreble material after all, and there is a lot to recommend aspects of the embryonic 2000AD, for it has ideas (not always its own ideas, but still), energy and a surfeit of exciting scenarios to recommend it. In terms of variety of strips, probably more thought went into the launch line up than ever did again, as everything fits into a distinct genre, albeit with a sci-fi twist (ie, western, war, sports, super-hero, space opera, crime). But it is still a way from hitting its stride, and Dredd aside none of the classic characters of its 80s glory years are there yet (and even Dredd is a very different character to the one we will get to know). It is not without reason that these are not the strips that were getting regularly reprinted by Titan, Eagle, IPC, Hamlyn or Fleetway until Rebellion took over the comic in the 21st century. But still, start as you mean to carry on - and this is my pick of 2000AD, 1977 vintage.

THRILL 1

JUDGE DREDD: Robots/Robot Wars
Progs 9-17 (9 episodes, 46 pages)
w John Wagner
a Ron Turner (4), Carlos Ezquerra (1), Mike McMahon (2), Ian Gibson (2)

Like a lot of 2000AD in 1977, early Judge Dredd is flailing around for a coherent direction. The character's creators, Wagner and Ezquerra, abandoned it in pique for its first two months of publication, and a lot of its first year is produced by a revolving cast of early 2000AD regulars and anonymous hack creatives who don't really know what the strip is about, who the central character is, and where it is heading overall. It is extraordinarily inconsistent in quality and tone, and sometimes unreadable. Amidst all this chaos, there were positive signs that here was something special, and in the early stages of the lawman's strip adventures nothing shines brighter than Wagner (and briefly Ezquerra's) return to the character, the first major Dredd story, Robot Wars. Giving early notice of some of Wagner's more zany impulses and foreshadowing some of the themes he would later revisit in such strips as Robo-Hunter and Mechanismo, Wagner gives a tour de force of exciting, bizarre and unhinged scriptwriting, signposting the possibilities of Mega-City One as a satirical playground. Compared to what came after, it's not really a classic by any stretch, but it is a very important staging post.

THRILL 2

HARLEM HEROES: Harlem Heroes
Progs 1-27 (27 episodes, 112 pages)
w Tom Tully
a Dave Gibbons (24), Massimo Belardinelli (3)

Written by Roy of the Rovers scribe Tom Tully and beautifully drawn by Dave Gibbons before he was poached away to Tharg's inferior Dan Dare strip, Harlem Heroes is a mixture of sporting comic strip cliches and absurdly over the top ultra violence, particularly in its second series, Inferno. Probably the most coherently constructed story of 2000AD's early days, and featuring by far the best recurring villain in psychotic Artie Gruber, Harlem Heroes is perfectly acceptable trashy 70s comics.

THRILL 3

M.A.C.H. 1
Progs 1-45 (45 episodes)
w Pat Mills, Alan Hebden, John Wagner, Scott Goodall, etc
a Enio, John Cooper, Jesus Redondo, Mike Dorey, etc

A stupendously silly strip, MACH 1 is a cheap and cheerful rip off of 70s tv mainstay The Six Million Dollar Man, and was, before Judge Dredd hit its stride, the most popular strip in 2000AD. Despite this widely reported fact, the adventures of John Probe ran out of steam in 1978, and have stayed resolutely in the 2000AD vaults more or less ever since, apart from selective reprints in 2000AD Extreme in 2004. Featuring customary ludicrous levels of po-faced cartoon violence for the under 12s, Probe's stories ran the gamut of spy cliche scenarios, and were all the better for it. MACH 1 stories were never more than 2 or 3 episodes long at most, so picking one as a standout is awkward. Perhaps Himmler's Gold (Prog 6), featuring underwater Nazi zombies, or Our Man in Turkostan (Prog 9) with the immortal line "They got hit by everything, including the kitchen sink!" as an Eastern bloc soldier lies squashed beneath a giant basin - I said it wasn't subtle, and nor was it even remotely politically correct. None of them are classics, the best of them are collected in a pair of issues of 2000AD Extreme and can be read inside an hour. Why not do that sometime?

THRILL 4

SHAKO
Progs 20-35 (16 episodes, 76 pages)
w John Wagner, with Pat Mills (4)
a Ramon Sola (4), Juan Arancio (3), Dodderio (1), Lopez Vera (8)

Shako, the only bear on the CIA death list, is a short and dumb strip from two of the major writers of 2000AD, John Wagner and Pat Mills, wherein nearly every week a polar bear bites body parts off Americans. It's not big, it's not clever, but you'll feel a tinge of sadness when it's all over.

THRILL 5

INVASION
Progs 1-51 (51 episodes)
w Gerry Finlay-Day, Pat Mills
a Mike Dorey, Carlos Pino, Jesus Blasco, etc

Pat Mills' story of unreconstructed macho hard nut Bill Savage (geddit?) and his battle with the occupying forces of the Volgans, went on and on for 2000AD's first year or so. After one soggy prequel, that was it for Bill for the best part of 3 decades, before he returned in, ahem, Savage. But more of that another day. Invasion is an old fashioned war story of the kind that post war British comics were so fond, except this time it's the distant future (1999), and  the enemy is from the Volgan Republic of Asia (so that's alright then!) as we're told in a report on the then non-existent BBC3 - it'd be a cheap shot to say that obviously watching a fifty megaton warhead wipe out the midlands is preferable to most of BBC3's actual eventual output, but I can't help myself. Invasion is not a great strip, let's face it, but like MACH 1 and Shako it has a certain "I can't believe this wasn't banned from its intended readership but I can't quite stop myself reading it" kind of quality to it. 

Of the rest of the strips - I'm no fan of Flesh, a rather colourless western with dinosaurs which despite some extremely long gaps in production is still staggering on to this day; the new Dan Dare might as well have been a completely different strip to the classic Frank Hampson et al Eagle stories of the 50s and 60s, with a crass and charmless central character with little resemblance to the original Dan either in terms of character or appearance, and who lacks, despite the update to make him fit in with the edgier, grungier feel of 70s British comics, still manages to seem dated and lacking in vigour, despite some customarily decent art from the likes of Dave Gibbons. The first batch of Future Shocks are largely forgettable, and will remain so until Alan Moore arrives on the scene in a few years time. 

Covers of the year? Prog 1 is obviously the most famous, but it is really just a vehicle for a cover-mounted frisbee, sorry, space spinner. 1977's 2000AD covers are unusual in that for a long stretch they had absolutely no connection to what could be found inside the covers. That's not to say they're not often wonderful though - it's as if the comic's artists have been given free rein to come up with outlandish b-movie images. My personal favourites are as follows, from progs 17, 18, 19, 24 and 29.