Who's Who in the CBU 2010

Name: Regie Rigby

Regie is a strange, almost ethereal creature. Who can plumb the hidden mysteries of his dark and murky past - a past which contains a terrible secret. A secret that taught him that with great power comes great responsibility, that criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot and just who exactly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

By day, he assumes the appearance of a mild mannered teacher, bringing the joy of literature and the English Language to classes of enthralled and enthusiastic students. But by night?

By night he goes home and writes lesson plans. Sorry. That's as interesting as he gets. Really.

The rumours about rooftop struggles with underworld uberfiends, the gossip about the hidden cave filled with hi-tec equipment and the suggestion that his car might be fitted with turbo lasers are all nonsense.

When he's not teaching he reads comics. Sometimes he combines the two activities. When he's not doing that he's either playing computer games or asleep.

These I Have Loved - Part Four: Polishing My Halo

By Regie Rigby

It’d be difficult to get nostalgic over 2000AD. One of the pre-requisites for nostalgia after all is that the thing one gets nostalgic about is firmly in the past. And despite the numerous predictions of gloom from various nay sayers dear old “Tooth” is very much still with us – a fact I continue to rejoice in.

But one of the things you get with any long running anthology title (and 2000AD has been around for very nearly a quarter of a century) is a whole back catalogue of strips that have been and gone. One such is The Ballad of Halo Jones.

A while ago I rambled on for a bit about Tank Girl, and referred to her as one of the girls who changed the way I looked at the world. Halo Jones had a similar influence on me. She leapt from the fevered mind of a certain Mr Alan Moore back in the mid eighties and, frankly took 2000AD by storm. She was unlike anything that (or any other) comic had seen before.

The basic set up was not that unusual. Dystopian futures are not all that rare in Sci-Fi, indeed they are something as a stock in trade for dear old Tooth, the comic which brought you Judge Dredd’s Mega City One, the mutant hating future England of Strontium Dog and the battle ravaged toxic wastes of Nu-Earth which were patrolled by the Rogue Trooper. So “The Hoop”, a floating ghetto moored off the coast of New York just fitted right in.

The Hoop is a repository for the people society didn’t want. The unemployed, the alien immigrants, the dysfunctional and the disruptive. A place for society to dump its human trash. A place that seemed all too likely to the young 2000AD readership growing up through the depressions of Thatcher’s Britain. This unpromising setting is where we first met Halo Jones, a seventeen year old girl with a strong will, a fiercely independent streak and, most of all, a burning, insatiable desire to get out.

Halo was one of the first real leading female characters to appear in 2000AD, and in hindsight it is striking that one of her first adventures is basically a shopping trip. However, this is an Alan Moore shopping spree, so you can rest assured that there is only the most subversive gender stereotyping going on. On this trip (and “trip” is very much an appropriate word to use) Halo and her friend Rodice face fashion conscious thugs, unhelpful guards, bizarre transcendental weaponry and (most frighteningly of all) fresh air!

But after a six hour wait for the train (which anyone who ever tried to use that form of transport in Britain will easily relate too) the girls return home to find their housemate brutally murdered and their young friend Ludy converted to a strange musical cult known as the “Different Drummers”. In the face of such tragedy Halo leaves.

Just leaves.

Turns her back and walks away to find a better life. The rest of the story deals with what happens next, as Halo’s adventures take her into deep space. There is desperation, loneliness, tragedy, triumph and war. Halo finds herself working passage on an intergalactic cruise ship, unemployed and drifting, and in the army fighting a pointless war in a hostile environment.

There is a scene where, after a leave of absence Halo re-enlists in the forces, and a scene involving another long term solider at the end of the war which qualify as the most moving I have ever seen in comics. Ideally I’d describe them to you, but this is one comic I’m going to encourage you all to read and I wouldn’t want to spoil them for you. Trust me, if you read the story, you’ll know them when you see them.

Halo’s world was a vastly different future to those envisaged in 2000AD’s other stories. Ian Gibson’s singular artistry gave everything a sort of rounded organic look, but also absolutely breathtaking beauty. Anyone who feels the way to make comics sexy is to draw small clothes and big breasts should take a look at Gibson’s work on Halo Jones.

She is, as I said, astonishingly beautiful (hey, this series is called “These I have Loved” after all…) but also possessed of that rather chaste sexuality that can make a woman clad from head to toe with not an inch of flesh on view infinitely more desirable than one in a string bikini. I have no idea how Gibson pulls this off. Much of his other work has been on the cartoony side, (check out his other 2000AD series, Sam Slade: Robo Hunter or I was a Teenage Tax Consultant to see what I mean.) but here he gets every scrap of realistic expression and emotion you could wish for into every single panel.

But Gibson’s art is not the most remarkable thing about Halo’s world. No, the most remarkable thing about Halo’s world, the thing that really sets it apart from the world of Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog or Rogue Trooper is that there are almost no men in it. Alan Moore gives us a Hoop with an overwhelmingly female population, and an army made up almost exclusively of female soldiers.

What is even more remarkable – particularly when you consider the “boys own” nature of 2000AD – is the fact that this virtually all female world seemed so utterly unremarkable to me the first time I read the strip. By the time Halo has joined an apparently all women army in book three of the saga there seemed nothing strange about the concept at all.

How does Moore do this?

Well, it’s obvious really. With the possible exception of From Hell (which is such a different animal the two shouldn’t really be compared anyway) this is without question the finest work the bearded one ever produced. Halo Jones is (IMHO of course) certainly the best strip ever to feature in ‘Tooth, as evidenced by the fact that it’s the one the fans always ask to have back.

Even (and this really does demonstrate the power of the character) fans who are too young to be able to remember her original appearances.

So why am I telling you this? More to the point, why have we been waiting for the better part of a decade and a half for our Heroine to return to us? Sure, the last we saw of her all those years ago was her ship blasting off into unknown space as she finally “Got out. Just out.”, but the closing caption clearly stated that this was not THE END, just the End of Book Three.

More than that, The Mighty Tharg (alien editor of 2000AD and all round galactic mega being) was often heard to hint that Halo would be returning. Indeed, I seem to recall that the words “very soon” might have been used at one point.

Legend has it that Moore fell out with 2000AD at some point, and since Northampton’s Hairiest Man was well able to pick and choose his own projects by then I guess he simply chose to go off and do something else. (I suspect that Rich could fill be in on the gory details) Wisely Tooth has so far elected not to bring the character back with anyone else on scripting chores, so we just have to wait and hope.

Still, with The Complete Ballad of Halo Jones reissued (and I suggest you dash out and grab a copy right now) and some genuine 2000AD fans (in the shape of Game Software developers Rebellion) at the helm of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic who knows what could happen?

Cross your fingers people. She went “out” many years ago. With any luck, she’ll be back sometime soon.