‘Eavy Metal

Discourse 2000 is a new project started by Tom Ewing, looking at the history of 2000AD. He explains why and how in its first installment:

I’ve wanted to write about 2000AD for years. It means a lot to me. It means a lot to most British comics readers of my age and a fair spread of years around that, I’d guess. A lot of my aesthetic sensibilities, in comics and frankly beyond them, are rooted in what 2000AD did to me at a tender age. Acquire a taste for thrill-power when your brain is young and open and it never really leaves. This blog is my attempt to do right by the comic.

Its format is simple. I’m not a historian in the archival, dates and interviews and reconciling sources sense. This is a critical history of 2000AD, in that I’m arranging its entries so they tell a roughly chronological story – but the emphasis is on criticism, which means I’m more interested in what appeared in the Prog than the details of how it got there.

But I’m interested in everything that appeared. Each entry will look at a different strip; each strip will get its own entry. I’m taking 2000AD a year at a time, aiming to cover the first 10 years at least, and long-running features with multiple stories (most obviously Judge Dredd) will get an entry for each year. But something like Inferno, which starts in 1977 and runs into 1978, will only get the one write-up. Sometimes the entries will stick closely to a discussion of the strip; sometimes they’ll range more widely. Britain in the late 70s and early 80s was a volatile, exciting place, even as it was also tacky, venal, and nasty. There’s a lot going on.

I didn’t get to 2000AD myself until a decade later, my entry point being, as it was for so many, Judge Dredd. Dredd had had a shortlived comics series in the Netherlands and I had gotten into superhero comics and he was close enough to one, right? That particular series ran for less than ten issues but did the Brian Bolland Cursed Earth saga which was mindblowing to a fourteen year old. Maybe even more important for a young metal head, Dredd had been namechecked in the liner notes for Anthrax’s Among the Living album, alongside such other late eighties comics like TMNT, The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Byrne’s Fantastic Four, Miller’s Daredevil, Boris the Bear and D.R. and Quinch, with Bolland, John Wagner, Ron Smith and Carlos Ezquerra also mentioned. The Anthrax boys were serious comics fans it seems and rare, knew their 2000AD. And what really fried my eighties nerdy teenage brain was this:

Anthrax wasn’t the only rock band to be inspired by Dredd of course; The Human League of all bands did their own version of I Am the Law. For me, it came at exactly the right time to drag me further into the comics rabbit hole. If a band as cool as them liked comics, liked Dredd, than comics must be cool too.

2000AD itself remained elusive to me however: it was only in 1990 or so that the local comic shop started carrying it, starting with prog 700. That was the first one I ever bought and I would continue buying it up until prog 824. In hindsight, this was one of the zine’s golden ages, with excellent new Dredd and Psi Judge Anderson stories and an influx of new talent like Garth Ennis, Philip Bond, Jamie Hewlett, Peter Milligan and John Smith. There was also the return of Grant Morrison and Zenith, one of those strips I’d only ever read about rather than had read. Reading this weekly was great, even if not every story or comic was to my liking. Every prog would have at least something interesting.

Over the decades since, 2000AD has only been an intermittent interest to me, to be sure. I haven’t read the zine since, but rather have bought the occassional collection of classic series, like Halo Jones or Strontium Dog. But at Worldcon this year I got curious again about that period in UK comics, roughly from 1988 to 1993 or so when it seemed that 2000AD might’ve brought into being a new sort of adult comics zine in Britain: Revolver, Crisis, Toxic, Blast. All sorts of earnest, mature monthly titles suddenly sprung up and seemed to have created a new market for a more grownup version of the 2000AD. Alas, all of them were gone in a year or two and it remained a pipedream, but seeing those on sale at the one comics dealer at Worldcon piqued my interest again. A lot of interesting ideas and comics were tried out in those years and much of it was first nurtured by 2000AD.

Tom Ewing’s new project therefore comes at the perfect time for me and judging by its first four released chapters, should be required reading for anybody curious about 2000AD.