In addition to the three regular weekly issues of 2000 AD that I picked up during my first foray to Xanadu Comics in Wilmington, Delaware, i also came away with this thicker and slightly more color-laden 1979 Sci-Fi Special. it included stand-alone stories featuring the magazine’s regular stars, including a couple that weren’t running in the three other issues I had sampled, so it gave me my first exposure to some of these other strips. It also included coverage of the film Meteor (about which I could not have cared less) and an interview with John Wagner and Brian Bolland. There were also a number of text stories, puzzle-features and other sundries.
The issue opened with a typically demented Judge Dredd story by the team of Alan Grant and Brett Ewins. In it, Judge Dredd is targeted for elimination by Don Uggie Apelino and his gang of hyperintelligent mutated apes. it was a bit of an overtly wackier Dredd outing than the others I experienced, with a strong satiric bent to it. The bad guys were straight out of the Godfather by way of Planet of the Apes, and didn’t at all bother to hide their influences a whit. The artwork was also a lot rougher-hewn than the slick polish of Brian Bolland. But at a full ten pages, it was a complete episode, and so I enjoyed it on that basis.
2000 AD was still sort of working out how best to approach Judge Dredd as a character, whether he was meant to be perceived as a hero in the classic mold or rather a cautionary tale of fascism run wild–the strip would push back and forth between the two extremes all throughout its lifetime. After the story, there came this very fun single-page “You Are A Judge” feature that gave readers the opportunity to determine what sort of a character they wanted to be (and by extension, where Dredd fell on their own personal moral spectrum.
Next came the first of two Tharg’s Future Shock stories in this issue. These were one-off science fiction stories that typically were built around a simple twist ending or shocking reveal. This one was written by Oleh Stepaniuk and illustrated by Alan Craddock and was a two-page lesson in communication, as a first contact situation goes utterly awry as each side unknowingly misinterprets the innocent actions of the other, leading to an all-out conflict. Pretty good for just two pages.
After the coverage of Meteor and a three-page text story starring Dan Dare, we got the second Tharg’s Future Shock installment for the issue, this one by Alan Grant and Nick Neocleous. It filled four pages, two more than was given its predecessor, and it was about a snotty kid getting (described as “big headed” for effect) trapped in a robotic version of a Tarzan jungle and ultimately having his head decapitated and shrunken for sale in the gift shop by the robot attractions. This one turned on the final image of the kid’s dangling head, lips sewn shut, but the image didn’t impress me, so this was a bit of a waste.
The credits on this next two-part feature are a mystery, but it has the feel of something that might have been commissioned for some other magazine entirely that was being burned off in the pages of this Special. It was The Kids from Kosmos, and it was dull and old fashioned-seeming. it made no impact on me at all, so the less said, the better.
Surrounding the Kids from Kosmos story was an assortment of other features: a color center-spread depicting a battle scene of Ro-Busters star Hammer-Stein, a generic sci-fi text story, a Ro-Busters readers feature which included an assortment of fan art, and this interview with John Wagner and Brian Bolland about working on Judge Dredd. It’s a relatively surface-level interview, hardly hard-hitting at all. But it does present a little bit of insight into the mentality of those who were crafting the Judge’s developing adventures at this particular moment.
The next strip, which opened up with a pair of full-color pages, was Strontium Dog, a series that had migrated over to 2000 AD from the pages of the relatively short-lived sister weekly STARLORD. it was a good series, starring mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha and his savage buddy Wulf. This outing was the work of Steve MacManus and Rob Moran and saw Johnny and Wulf cleaning up a science fictional western town out on the frontier, becoming the place’s interim marshal and deputy. The art was a bit crude, with a lot of anatomical distortion to it, but that only added to its impact, strangely.
And in case you wanted to ply your trade as a bounty hunter like Johnny and Wulf, the next page featured a “You Are Strontium Dog” quiz similar to the earlier Judge Dredd one.
The final story in the issue was M.A.C.H. 1–Man Activated by Compu-puncture Hyperpower. It was 2000 AD’s knock-off of the popular Six Million Dollar Man, and it isn’t recalled all that fondly today. But I have to admit that I enjoyed it, at least for this one episode. It was by Gary Rice and Garry Leach and pitted agent John Probe against a team of terrorists who had taken over a Taxaco off-shore oil rig. Like Deathlok, Probe has an onboard computer that he talks to and he’s been given a wide array of physical enhancements through a process of “computerized acupuncture”, whatever that is. But it was effectively a super hero strip, albeit one without a costume, and so I liked it for just running the bases.
The back cover on the issue included this cool schematic of the workings of Hammer-Stein, one of the stars of the Ro-Busters strip as well as A.B.C. Warriors, which is where I knew him from. He was one of those characters from British comics who started out as a more comedic figure and then transitioned into being played as a legitimate action hero–much the same arc that Axel Pressbutton had gone through.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 