Introductory
Well here I am ruminating on myself, 2000 AD and British comics. I’m in a study which doubles as a sauna in the Japanese summer, listening to Puffy AmiYumi. I thought I’d kick this column lark off with a brief tour of the other places where I first met 2000 AD. How does a forty-something Australian expat wind up writing about British comics? Like those endless arguments over what was the first novel, where was the first opera, my memories of where I first discovered the world of Judge Dredd, the Strontium Dogs etc keep adding new special places.
Place the first was a ratty student house in inner-city Melbourne, Australia, inhabited by two scruffy math/computer science students. I used to drop in on them and share dope and coffee. Given that these blokes used to clean their coffee cups by swooshing their fingers around, I’m lucky to be alive. I remember the wackier of the two showing me a hardback collection of Dredd stories and enthusing about the
Prison on a traffic island (inescapable because future traffic moves so quickly) and Judge Deat’s brilliant slogan “the crime is life, the sentence is death”. I was impressed with the skinniness of the characters, after a teenagerhood of reading about chunky American superheroes, the bandy-legged Judges impressed me as very…British.
Fast forward about six years and three jobs to an area not far from the first one. Now I was working at a job centre, interviewing ex-prisoners, annoying students, refugees and hopeless cases who wanted work. I used to walk to work to save money and hopefully lose weight. My path took me through Lygon Street, a long street full of beautiful Victorian cottages, most of which have been turned into Italian restaurants or cafes. It struck me that I could buy a magazine and sit at a pavement table drinking phenomenally strong coffee reading it, feeling all continental and putting off the beginning of my day in hell.
I bought “The Spectator”, a right wing periodical with excellent book reviews. This shop also had comics. This is the point at which the “daaah, daaah, daaah, DA-DAAAH!” music from “2001” starts up, because it weren’t for that, I probably wouldn’t be writing this now, nor would I have about four hundred back issues of 2000 AD and assorted graphic novels secreted around the room. I bought the Phantom (an Australian and Scandinavian obsession, maybe more on this later) a new Captain America comic and….(more “thus Spake Zarathustra” music please) 2000AD.
The Captain America comic was a forgettable one-off in which the Captain has an exoskeleton and is accompanied by a female sidekick whose swimsuit is so high sided it starts at the armpits. Extremely boring and a sad shadow of past glories as I remembered them from my teen years. But the 2000 AD was something else. The cover (Prog 930) showed two blue GIs glowering at each other. The stories were something else. Dredd was in the middle of a kind of international Judge tournament in the Antarctic, Finn was battling the evil aliens who are responsible for capitalism, repression and the Church of England, Armoured Gideon was revisiting a journalist’s memories of the Vietnam War and the Harlem Heroes were looking gorgeous (drawn by Siku and Kev Hopgood) and having hackneyed adventures. I was hooked.
It helped that 2000 AD was having something of a reprinting frenzy at the time. This has been disparaged by various editors since but for a new reader it was perfect. I had the choice of Classic Judge Dredd, Best of 2000 AD monthly, 2000 AD and the Megazine (I drew the line at Judge Dredd – Lawman of the Future). I got to read some classic old-school Dredd stuff (I can remember Russell Muscle who sold inflatable muscles – there’s those scrawny British characters again!). I got to read “Sinister Dexte’s” immensely enjoyable first outing (in one of the sci-fi specials).
I have to be honest; the Judge Dredd movie had helped. I had seen it with a housemate. “It’s just an action movie. How bad can it be?” I say this before every bad action movie I see; you’d think I’d learn wouldn’t you? It’s amazing how easy it is to get a simple action movie wrong. The Dredd movie, which as most people know, falls apart before the halfway mark but it did put Dredd in my mind. Was the comic still being printed?
I soon built up a smallish collection, but not a continuous one. If I got up late or the shop didn’t have anything, I just missed out on what happened to the head of Judge Eckhart (the McGuffin that all the Judges were chasing in “Crusade”), never found out how Shimura’s brilliantly spooky story finished in the Megazine. I had other fish to fry.
But, things moved on and I wound up in Japan, where I live now. Japan makes expat work for their small pleasures, in particular reading. I don’t know why, but the English magazine/book shops are always at the top of the building they are in. One should bring oxygen equipment and a healthy bank balance. Anyway, they didn’t have 2000 AD and I started to miss it. So I subscribed. I didn’t have to climb to the top of a tall building to do this, but it wasn’t much easier. There was a lot of hunting around on the Internet and a few phone calls but it finally came. A quite ordinary Dredd story, a dull cover, but it was my own and there would be another one next week.
At this time I was living in a six foot by twelve-foot room in a boarding house, with no air conditioning. In summer I used to lie there feeling the fan move the hairs on my chest while I tried to sleep. That Prog always brings that back for me, my third beginning. Now I had the regular input and email access, I wrote a letter just for fun.
Guess what, they printed it.
NEXT WEEK: 2000AD Brain Trust-Send Your Questions To W_Cooling@yahoo.co.uk.
