Yesterday's papers - 2000AD

Next to the Beano and Dandy, 2000AD is arguably the best known British comic. It first came out in 1977 and is still running today.

British comics always followed trends and with Star Wars and Close Encounters raking in so much money at the cinema screens. Pat Mills who had created both Battle and Action for IPC was given the job of creating the new comic and he brought on board John Wagner. Together they would create a British comic legend - for the first time Britain had a comic that was actually influencing its American counterparts and many of the creators would move onto the larger American  market and become household names. The name 2000AD was selected because it was suitable futuristic sounding in 1977 and no-one expected the comic to still be going strong in 2010AD.

The lead character in the early days was another version of Dan Dare - this time the revamp was extreme and the story saw Dare wake from suspended animation several centuries after his original timeline. The visual look - artist Belardinelli - was hallucinatory and very imaginative. But although popular Dare was soon replaced in the popularity stakes by Jude Dredd - a character that today still rules 2000AD and also has his own spin-off title. Interesting trivia is that Judge Dredd, although called a character from the original line up, didn't actually appear until the second issue.

When the comic initially launched in 1977 I was almost twelve years old - the perfect age for this sort of thing and the comic quickly became a favourite. I read every issue because after reading my copy of Battle each week I would swap in with a mate down the street who took the comic. Couldn't afford two comics a week in those days - 8p was a pricely sum, you know!

A favourite strip of mine was Flesh which was basically a futuristic western set in the prehistoric past - to explain in the future all animals are extinct and yet the human need for a Big Mac is as strong as ever, and so by travelling back in time vast food factories are built in the prehistoric period and dinosaurs are hunted for their meat.

The meat is then, processed, packaged and sent into the future where it is sold in the automated supermarkets. The strip toyed with the paradox that it was actually men who caused the extinction of the dinosaurs before the homo sapien species had actually evolved on Earth. The men who hunted the dinosaurs were called rangers and wore cowboys hats and everything.

2000AD really was a different comic and although Battle remained my favourite this ran a close second - Bill Savage was a classic character who battled the Volgan Army who had invaded Britain in 1999. Other than its futuristic setting it was the same intense action as depicted in the World War II strips of Battle - bloody fun though.

The Harlem Heroes was a cool story about a team of Aeroball players (imagine American Football with no rules, a little bit of basketball and jet-packs.) and it was tremendously exciting. In the first strip the team was involved in a hover-powered road liner crash and many of the team were killed. Louis, the teams leader, only survives as a brain in a jar and he tells the other three survivors that they must continue and rebuild the team to honour the dead.

The plastic space spinner toy given away with issue 1 was actually quite cool.

And then there was MACH 1, who I've written about before,. The character was very much based on TV's The Six Million Dollar Man and I remember the strip as being among my favourites from the early days.

2000AD these days is still thriving and has gone through changes in owenership several times. Although I must confess to not reading it weekly these days I do pick it up from time to time, recently because it was running another Bill Savage storyline. I buy the Judge Dredd Megazine ( Yep Megezine rather than magazine in reference to Judge Dredd's Mega City setting ) more often as I find the longer strips allow for far deeper story-lines than possible in the weekly format.

Childhood diversions - M.A.C.H. 1

M.A.C.H. 1, real name John Probe appeared in the very first issue of 2000AD way back in the day. I loved this character so much as a kid that I remembered creating my own version of the character in rough twelve year old handwriting. Just as people these days write fan fic about Star Wars, James Bond or even Buffy then so too did I, as a kid, write my own M.A.C.H. 1 novels. I called my guy The Ultimate Spy and he was very much a rip off of M.A.C.H.1 but that was okay since M.A.C.H. 1 was very much a rip off of TV's The Six Millon Dollar Man - only much more gritty.

M.A.C.H. 1 stands for man activated by compu-puncture hyperpower and John Probe was the first so he was M.A.C.H 1- however we would find out later that there was actually another man who went through the process of compu-puncture but it went wrong and turned that man into a hulking brute called M.A.C.H 0. later we would also learn that the Russians had also been experimenting with the process when they sent their super hero, a woman, to kill Probe.

The first episode saw British agent, John Probe (he was even drawn to look a bit like Lee Majors.) undergoing the final part of the experiment that would turn him into a super secret agent. The character was created by Pat Mills and the artist on these early episodes was Enio. The strip ran to 64 weekly episodes with the character becoming more and more anti-Establishment as time wore on. By then end of the stories run , after some 64 interrupted weeks, John Probe had turned against his creators in the British government. This was a time when the UK was in Socialist meltdown with three day weeks, flash strikes across the public sector, the electricity being turned off most evenings to save Britain's dwindling resources and Punk Rock had given the Establishment a good kick in the arse.

In this first episode we learn that Probe's boss is the sinister Sharpe and that Probe's compu-puncture has given him super strength and endurance. He can also talk with the computer inside his brain which was a useful device for the writers to advance the story. Before his training is complete Probe finds himself thrown into action when a group of terrorists attack a R.A.F base at Cottesdale. Suffice to say Probe saves the day but little hints are dropped that the compu- puncture whilst turning him into a superman also has a dark side.

Right from the start 2000ad was edgier than most British boys comics, which is perhaps the reason why it is still running today. And all the stories had grit to them - another early story saw John Probe sent to execute the president of Iranian and stop him from sending his armies in to invade Turkostan.

In the early days of the comic M.A.C.H. 1 was my second favourite character (my all time fave was Volgan basher, Bill Savage) and I was not alone - in Dec 2004 when 2000AD published a collection of the early strips it was announced that initially the character was more popular than Judge Dredd and Dan Dare combined.

Comic books were great in those days and each week I would rush to the newsagents clutching my 8p for the lastest issue of 2000AD (the current comic costs £1.90) and rush home for my weekly fix - usually with some Black Jacks and Fruit Salad sweets to chew on while I devoured the latest adventures and wallowed in the thrill power . That's what they called it - THRILL POWER - and the comic would often print warnings before stories, "WARNING THRILL POWER OVERLOAD"

Judge Dredd, Dan Dare (2000ad's cyberpunk rebranding of the character), Invasion 1999 (Bill Savage kicking Volgan arse), Flesh (future time travellers set up meat processing plants in prehistoric times to feed people of the future when all animals are extinct), Harlem Heroes (a sort of futuristic Harlem Globetrotters) and of course M.A.C.H. 1. Incidentally Flesh was a western set in the future - since the people at the meat plant were called rangers, dressed like cowboys and the first major series took place in a frontier town called Carver City - I'll write a post about Flesh one day.

Those were the days indeed!