Music Banter - View Single Post - Trollheart's Futureshock: Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and the world of 2000 AD

Trollheart · 11-03-2014, 01:49 PM

Disclaimer: Although it may seem like it, I am not copying Batty here, nor jumping on the comic book journal bandwagon, such as it is. I had this idea long before I took my sabbatical, and have been thinking about it for about six months. In fact, when I saw Batty’s journal I was annoyed, because I had intended to be the first to broach this subject in the section. Those of you who know me know I do not rob other people’s ideas; I’m all about being original and if possible first. In any case, as you will see from reading the introduction below, this is not intended to be anything like Batty’s journal. I know he’ll say I ripped him off, but I didn’t.

Back when I were a kid, as I’ve gone on about at length several times, we had little in the way of the sort of amusements kids have these days. We had no mobile phones, no internet, no X-Boxes or Playstations. We had maybe three or four television channels, and quite often these could be unwatchable due to bad reception, a term the younger ones among you will greet with blank incomprehension, and not realise how lucky you are not to understand. For a fuller explanation, and an idea of how it was in my day, see my article about television in my main journal.

If we wanted to entertain ourselves we either played outside (shock!) or read comics. Yeah, you knew I was coming to it, didn’t you? As a child you had not too many choices. You had the “funnies” --- The Beano, the Dandy, Whizzer and Chips, The Beezer, Topper etc, wherein unlikely characters like Billy Whizz, The Bash Street Kids and Desperate Dan would make us laugh in mostly pretty formulaic ways, and the stories never had much originality about them. There were the rivalries back then --- you were either a Dandy or a Beano reader (I was Dandy; more a Korky the Kat man than a Biffo the Bear) --- but generally speaking they all more or less worked to the one pattern. Then as you got a little older, as a boy you could have the football comics --- Shoot, Match, Striker and so on ---- or the war comics like Warlord, Battle Picture Weekly and War Picture Library.

I was a Battle kid, and followed the adventures of D-Day Dawson, Major Eazy and the rest with rapt fascination, occasionally allowing Warlord a look in, as I checked out the exploits of their eponymous character, as well as Killer Kane and Union Jack Jackson (seriously!), wishing they were in my comic, because again you could be one or the other, but not both. A silly, childish rivalry that carried on into our teens. But although I enjoyed the war comics, I was at heart a geek, and science fiction and fantasy were my weapon of choice. However, in the late seventies and early eighties there were no comics based specifically, or even partially, on those topics. The closest you could get was Eagle, which was laughably “stiff-upper-lip” with lantern-jawed Dan Dare taking on the Mekon and his alien horde in the name of England and the Queen. Yuck.

Then one day I noticed an ad on the TV for a new comic. It looked exciting, it looked thrilling, and it was (apparently) run by an alien! Wow! I rushed out the next day to buy it, and a love affair began which endures to this day. 2000 AD—still so named, even though we are now almost fifteen years into the twenty-first century—became my perfect avenue for escape from the humdrum drudgery of a life in Dublin, with little prospects of adventure, going to a school I hated and living with an abusive father. Rather ironically, it was created by two of the men whom publisher IPC had turned to in an attempt to rival Warlord, and who then produced Battle Picture Weekly. I would shut myself up in my room, having come home with “The Prog”, as it became known, and lose myself in the adventures of the heroes and villians depicted within those pages.

2000 AD was the first comic to take children, or even young adults, seriously. The war comics had, to a degree, but they spoke to us, if at all, through the likes of the letters pages, as soldiers, as if we all wanted to march off to war. To be honest, sometimes I did of course dream of emulating the deeds of my heroes in that comic. but what was I to do? World War II was over, long over, and despite the mostly positive spin put on the characters, war is hell and I knew that. So I didn’t really want to fight in one, no more than I wanted to be a footballer. And I didn’t, unlike a lot of impressionable kids, want to be an astronaut or space ranger, but I loved reading about them and it helped fuel my (completely unfulfilled) writing ambitions.

Another thing 2000 AD brought to the genre, which had been sadly lacking, was a wicked sense of humour. Sure, Warlord and Battle had their moments, when the men --- exclusively, men; women did not fight in war --- took a break from the killing fields and sat back with a cigarette or played the opposing team at soccer. But generally the stories were hard, brutal, uncompromising, though nothing compared to another title which had briefly arisen and assured itself of its place in history a year earlier, the infamous Action. But I digress.

2000 AD was the first comic to bring dark, acerbic humour to its pages Even on the mean streets of Mega-City One, the mostly hopeless and despondent population could crack a joke, and even the dour, grim-faced Judge Dredd occasionally allowed a tiny smile --- inside, never ever outside! --- to break through. Like the time he faces a man four or five times his size, one of the denizens of Mega-City One who were rather unkindly if accurately called Fatties, Two-Ton Tony Tubbs, who sulks “I have no friends” to which Dredd replies, deadpan, “You’re telling me! Looks like you ate your friends!” Or the other, unnamed judge who advises a citizen “You’re under arrest!” When asked what for, the judge replies “What do you mean, what for? For turning into a giant spider!” The luckless man, who situation we will not go into here, asks rather reasonably, “Is that a crime?” to which the obviously confused judge shrugs “You know, you’ve got me there!”

Although the world of 2000 AD was not to be made fun of --- there was some very dark material being used --- humour was, and probably still is, a constant thread that runs through it, like a silver lining in a particularly heavy cloud. It showed us that not everything has to be taken seriously all the time, and probably pointed the way for many of the later one-liners and catchphrases, from Arnie to Willis and from Vin Diesel to Van Damme. But although the aforementioned Judge Dredd was and remains its most famous son, about whom two movies have now been made, with varying success, the comic also had some other huge heroes. Johnny Alpha, the mutant bounty hunter from Strontium Dog. Slaine, Irish warrior from mythology. Rogue Trooper. Ace Garp. Halo Jones.

And overseeing all of this, like some benevolent alien grandfather, loomed The Mighty Tharg, a green extraterrestrial who was said to come from a planet orbiting Betelgeuse, the red giant star. He would introduce each issue, which as I mentioned became known as “Progs” (short of course for programme) and give us an idea what we could look forward to this week (something no other comic had done; almost like a table of contents or an announcer on TV reeling off the list of shows to be broadcast that night), as well as perhaps dropping in a few interesting tidbits about himself. He liked to eat plastic cups, we were told. His power came from the odd, vaguely Indian-like emblem on his forehead, which he called his Rosette of Sirius. And he called us “earthlets”, to distinguish us from our parents or the older boys and girls. We were charged, too, with the task of spreading the word about the comic, and he would always sign off with the words "Splundig vur Thrigg" and open with the phrase "Borag Thungg", obviously hello.

In this new journal I’ll be looking at comics deeply --- or more accurately, one comic --- but unlike The Batlord I will not be venturing into the worlds of Marvel or DC. My focus will be almost exclusively on this publication, and I will be writing in detail about the characters and stories, the future heroes and legends who came out of the pages of 2000 AD. I will be concentrating firstly on Judge Dredd, detailing his adventures and explaining about his backstory, the world he inhabits and how this affected me growing up. Later I will move on to Strontium Dog, my second favourite character, and after than I don’t know: I haven’t really thought that far ahead. Occasionally I may venture into the realm of specific graphic novels, such as V for Vendetta and Watchmen, though if that happens it will be some way down the line.

For now, I will be looking at Dredd and in the next, and first proper, entry I will be writing about his very first adventure, when he roared onto the pages of 2000 AD and changed the lives forever of millions of hungry, jaded and impressionable young boys.

11-03-2014, 01:49 PM	#1 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,970	Trollheart's Futureshock: Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and the world of 2000 AD Disclaimer: Although it may seem like it, I am not copying Batty here, nor jumping on the comic book journal bandwagon, such as it is. I had this idea long before I took my sabbatical, and have been thinking about it for about six months. In fact, when I saw Batty’s journal I was annoyed, because I had intended to be the first to broach this subject in the section. Those of you who know me know I do not rob other people’s ideas; I’m all about being original and if possible first. In any case, as you will see from reading the introduction below, this is not intended to be anything like Batty’s journal. I know he’ll say I ripped him off, but I didn’t. Back when I were a kid, as I’ve gone on about at length several times, we had little in the way of the sort of amusements kids have these days. We had no mobile phones, no internet, no X-Boxes or Playstations. We had maybe three or four television channels, and quite often these could be unwatchable due to bad reception, a term the younger ones among you will greet with blank incomprehension, and not realise how lucky you are not to understand. For a fuller explanation, and an idea of how it was in my day, see my article about television in my main journal. If we wanted to entertain ourselves we either played outside (shock!) or read comics. Yeah, you knew I was coming to it, didn’t you? As a child you had not too many choices. You had the “funnies” --- The Beano, the Dandy, Whizzer and Chips, The Beezer, Topper etc, wherein unlikely characters like Billy Whizz, The Bash Street Kids and Desperate Dan would make us laugh in mostly pretty formulaic ways, and the stories never had much originality about them. There were the rivalries back then --- you were either a Dandy or a Beano reader (I was Dandy; more a Korky the Kat man than a Biffo the Bear) --- but generally speaking they all more or less worked to the one pattern. Then as you got a little older, as a boy you could have the football comics --- Shoot, Match, Striker and so on ---- or the war comics like Warlord, Battle Picture Weekly and War Picture Library. I was a Battle kid, and followed the adventures of D-Day Dawson, Major Eazy and the rest with rapt fascination, occasionally allowing Warlord a look in, as I checked out the exploits of their eponymous character, as well as Killer Kane and Union Jack Jackson (seriously!), wishing they were in my comic, because again you could be one or the other, but not both. A silly, childish rivalry that carried on into our teens. But although I enjoyed the war comics, I was at heart a geek, and science fiction and fantasy were my weapon of choice. However, in the late seventies and early eighties there were no comics based specifically, or even partially, on those topics. The closest you could get was Eagle, which was laughably “stiff-upper-lip” with lantern-jawed Dan Dare taking on the Mekon and his alien horde in the name of England and the Queen. Yuck. Then one day I noticed an ad on the TV for a new comic. It looked exciting, it looked thrilling, and it was (apparently) run by an alien! Wow! I rushed out the next day to buy it, and a love affair began which endures to this day. 2000 AD—still so named, even though we are now almost fifteen years into the twenty-first century—became my perfect avenue for escape from the humdrum drudgery of a life in Dublin, with little prospects of adventure, going to a school I hated and living with an abusive father. Rather ironically, it was created by two of the men whom publisher IPC had turned to in an attempt to rival Warlord, and who then produced Battle Picture Weekly. I would shut myself up in my room, having come home with “The Prog”, as it became known, and lose myself in the adventures of the heroes and villians depicted within those pages. 2000 AD was the first comic to take children, or even young adults, seriously. The war comics had, to a degree, but they spoke to us, if at all, through the likes of the letters pages, as soldiers, as if we all wanted to march off to war. To be honest, sometimes I did of course dream of emulating the deeds of my heroes in that comic. but what was I to do? World War II was over, long over, and despite the mostly positive spin put on the characters, war is hell and I knew that. So I didn’t really want to fight in one, no more than I wanted to be a footballer. And I didn’t, unlike a lot of impressionable kids, want to be an astronaut or space ranger, but I loved reading about them and it helped fuel my (completely unfulfilled) writing ambitions. Another thing 2000 AD brought to the genre, which had been sadly lacking, was a wicked sense of humour. Sure, Warlord and Battle had their moments, when the men --- exclusively, men; women did not fight in war --- took a break from the killing fields and sat back with a cigarette or played the opposing team at soccer. But generally the stories were hard, brutal, uncompromising, though nothing compared to another title which had briefly arisen and assured itself of its place in history a year earlier, the infamous Action. But I digress. 2000 AD was the first comic to bring dark, acerbic humour to its pages Even on the mean streets of Mega-City One, the mostly hopeless and despondent population could crack a joke, and even the dour, grim-faced Judge Dredd occasionally allowed a tiny smile --- inside, never ever outside! --- to break through. Like the time he faces a man four or five times his size, one of the denizens of Mega-City One who were rather unkindly if accurately called Fatties, Two-Ton Tony Tubbs, who sulks “I have no friends” to which Dredd replies, deadpan, “You’re telling me! Looks like you ate your friends!” Or the other, unnamed judge who advises a citizen “You’re under arrest!” When asked what for, the judge replies “What do you mean, what for? For turning into a giant spider!” The luckless man, who situation we will not go into here, asks rather reasonably, “Is that a crime?” to which the obviously confused judge shrugs “You know, you’ve got me there!” Although the world of 2000 AD was not to be made fun of --- there was some very dark material being used --- humour was, and probably still is, a constant thread that runs through it, like a silver lining in a particularly heavy cloud. It showed us that not everything has to be taken seriously all the time, and probably pointed the way for many of the later one-liners and catchphrases, from Arnie to Willis and from Vin Diesel to Van Damme. But although the aforementioned Judge Dredd was and remains its most famous son, about whom two movies have now been made, with varying success, the comic also had some other huge heroes. Johnny Alpha, the mutant bounty hunter from Strontium Dog. Slaine, Irish warrior from mythology. Rogue Trooper. Ace Garp. Halo Jones. And overseeing all of this, like some benevolent alien grandfather, loomed The Mighty Tharg, a green extraterrestrial who was said to come from a planet orbiting Betelgeuse, the red giant star. He would introduce each issue, which as I mentioned became known as “Progs” (short of course for programme) and give us an idea what we could look forward to this week (something no other comic had done; almost like a table of contents or an announcer on TV reeling off the list of shows to be broadcast that night), as well as perhaps dropping in a few interesting tidbits about himself. He liked to eat plastic cups, we were told. His power came from the odd, vaguely Indian-like emblem on his forehead, which he called his Rosette of Sirius. And he called us “earthlets”, to distinguish us from our parents or the older boys and girls. We were charged, too, with the task of spreading the word about the comic, and he would always sign off with the words "Splundig vur Thrigg" and open with the phrase "Borag Thungg", obviously hello. In this new journal I’ll be looking at comics deeply --- or more accurately, one comic --- but unlike The Batlord I will not be venturing into the worlds of Marvel or DC. My focus will be almost exclusively on this publication, and I will be writing in detail about the characters and stories, the future heroes and legends who came out of the pages of 2000 AD. I will be concentrating firstly on Judge Dredd, detailing his adventures and explaining about his backstory, the world he inhabits and how this affected me growing up. Later I will move on to Strontium Dog, my second favourite character, and after than I don’t know: I haven’t really thought that far ahead. Occasionally I may venture into the realm of specific graphic novels, such as V for Vendetta and Watchmen, though if that happens it will be some way down the line. For now, I will be looking at Dredd and in the next, and first proper, entry I will be writing about his very first adventure, when he roared onto the pages of 2000 AD and changed the lives forever of millions of hungry, jaded and impressionable young boys. __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018 Last edited by Trollheart; 11-08-2019 at 08:29 PM.