
There are, of course, many ways in which British culture has jumped over and influenced American culture. But the British Invasion in the comics industry remains one that it’s easy to miss the significance of, in part because its three leading lights – Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Neil Gaiman – have largely sucked the oxygen from the event, obscuring the fact that for a significant period of time the overwhelming majority of significant comics writers and artists in the US were, in fact, British. Consider the following list: Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Peter Milligan, Jamie Delano, Andy Diggle, Mike Carey, Andrew Cartmel, Paul Cornell, Mark Millar, Lawrence Miles, Warren Ellis, Tony Lee, Alan Davis, Barry Kitson, Dave Gibbons, Glen Fabry, Kevin O’Neil, Bryan Talbot, Gary Erskine, Frank Quitely, Trevor Hairsine, Sam Kieth, John McRea, Frazer Irvine, Brian Bolland, Garry Leach, Steve Yeowell, Steve Dillon, John Ridgway, Carlos Ezquerra, Pat Mills, John Wagner, Jock, John Bolton, Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, and Mark Buckingham. Aside from one or two Doctor Who names I threw in there because this is a Doctor Who blog after all, these are some of the biggest names in comics, whether because they are or at some point were superstars or because they were on one or two massively famous projects. But more significantly, everyone on that list has published at least one thing in either 2000 AD or its spinoff Judge Dredd Megazine. And for the majority of them that was some of their earliest work.
So if you want to suggest that 2000 AD is one of the most important British science fiction publications ever, period, you’re not exactly short on ammunition for your case. On the other hand, generally speaking, if you want to argue that it was one of the best… well, now you’re in a bit of a harder situation. Because as vital as 2000 AD was and at times still is, it’s not exactly… good.
First some background. In late 1975 an editor at IPC Magazines got an inkling that science fiction might hit it big soon and hired Pat Mills to develop it. Pat Mills had overseen two previous comics aimed at the same age group – Battle Picture Weekly and the infamous Action, which was sufficiently violent and blood-soaked to as to piss off Mary Whitehouse. 2000 AD was a stunning example in the same vein. There were five strips in its first issue – sorry, prog – Invasion, Dan Dare, Harlem Heroes, Flesh, and M.A.C.H. 1. Almost all of them are gloriously and tastelessly violent – only Dan Dare, reimagined as a more properly “futuristic” strip, displays even a glimmer of basic taste. Harlem Heroes is about a sport that combines “football, boxing, kung fu, and basketball,” while M.A.C.H. 1 was an ultraviolent Six Million Dollar Man ripoff. Invasion was about working class British men violently resisting Soviet… sorry, Volgan occupation. And Flesh, perhaps the greatest of all of them, was about time traveling dinosaur farmers and a particularly murderous T-Rex.…
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