Who's Who in the CBU 2008

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.

'Toothsome!

By Regie Rigby

Sorry, late yet again! I’ve been away from my internet connection for more than a week now, and although I’d made elaborate plans to ensure that the column would still be posted on time, they don’t seem to have worked. Huge apologies as ever, but since I find myself in an island in the Outer Hebrides unexpectedly in range of a wireless broadband signal, I’m grasping the opportunity to post a double dose of FoolBritannia. This was supposed to be a two part column, but here it is now, presented in feature length glory!

OK. So last time I talked about the anthropomorphic SF Fest that is Reynard City, and not, as promised, the long running icon of British Comics that is 2000AD, which is what I’d promised I’d do.

So? So I’m late with a subject. Like that’s unusual.

Besides, I’m one of those generous teachers that can be relied upon to give you an extension on your homework deadline – and you did have homework for this edition. If you remember, I asked you to take a look at a recent issue of 2000AD, the self styled Galaxy’s Greatest Comic. Tharg’s Thrillfest turns thirty this year, and after reviewing David Bishop’s excellent Thrillpower Overload; I thought it might be time to have a look at the comic itself.

‘Tooth has confounded the sceptics and survived longer than every single comparable title ever published in the UK. In fact I think I’m right in saying that only the venerable D.C.Thompson humour titles The Beano and The Dandy have exceeded ‘Tooth’s quite exceptional longevity.

That, however, proves nothing. Being old doesn’t necessarily make you good. It suggests popularity, since to survive a long time a comic needs to be able to maintain sales at a reasonable level. But it’s a mistake to assume that popularity and quality are somehow linked – especially in entertainment. How many excellent TV shows have been cancelled because of low ratings? How many bloody awful TV shows regularly pull in audiences of millions?

Exactly.

So – we return to the key question. Is 2000AD still worth reading after all these years? Does it deserve its popularity, or has it survived simply because a bunch of sad old gits like me continue to buy it out of habit, regardless of content or quality?

(And before we go any further, I should really declare an interest. I’ve been reading 2000AD every week for twenty of its thirty years on the racks. I’m a fan. It’s been a part of my life for longer than pretty much everything else I value. I will, of course, endeavour to maintain professional objectivity, but as readers you really ought to take that into account when you read the rest of this two part exploration.)

Let’s start with now.

What’s currently in 2000AD? Well, hanging in there, jaw firmly set in a permanent frown is everybody’s favourite fascist Judge Joe Dredd. Dredd, the Judge Force he belongs to, and the world he inhabits (which just keeps getting bigger and more real) have long been the cornerstone of ‘Tooth.

It wasn’t meant to be like that – indeed Dredd didn’t even appear in the first issue of the comic. The flagship strip was meant to be a revamp of that icon of British S/F Dan Dare. I don’t like to judge historic comics too harshly – they are for the most part products of their time – so let’s just say that the Dan Dare strips from the early days of 2000AD don’t hold up very well under a modern gaze, and leave it at that.

Like all good ideas, Dredd evolved slowly. He started out as a sort of “Dirty Harry of the future” (or should that be “Dirty Harry Beyond”?). In the beginning his beat was not Mega-City One, but New York, and he patrolled alongside regular cops. But there’s always been an edge there. Reading the recently released reprints of those first Dredd Strips I was reminded that however tough Dredd is now, you don’t get many summary executions on the street in the Big Meg these days. You did back in ’77.

Nowadays he’s an old man – although he’s been considered that since the early ‘nineties. But his age makes him interesting, as does the three decades of continuity that has built up around him. (And yes, I know I don’t normally approve of strict adherence to continuity, but I’ll be addressing that next week, so just shut up about it for now, OK?)

The continuity is different because he’s really grown as a character over the years. He’s still tough. He’s still fair. He’s even still a stickler for the rules. (He is the law, after all…) But as he’s aged, he’s also gained experience and wisdom, the way real people do, and like most real people he’s begun to question the laws that he is sworn to uphold.

The crucial thing here though, is that however much he wrestles with his conscience, however much he questions the rightness of the law, he continues to enforce it to the letter. That contradiction is now the very essence of Dredd, and that internal conflict is what lifts the stories above mere “Dirty Harry rip-off” status.

Take this recent story sequence as an example:

First you have Origins.

This was an epic multi episode arc concerning the hunt for the body of the “Father of Justice”, Chief Judge Fargo, the first Chief Judge of Mega-City One. Through flashback sequences that were, in fact rather more important than the main action, we were presented with the new definitive version of how the Judges came to take power in what used to be America, and what the role of the young cadets Joseph and Rico Dredd had been.

All good retconning stuff, but it also put Dredd centre stage. Without him, the last President of the United States might never have fallen. The Judges might never have taken power. But the clincher comes at the end. They find Fargo. He’s not dead. Not quite. The last thing he says to Dredd before the end? That he thought the Judges were wrong to have taken power. That they had gone too far. That the citizens had been given security at the cost of their liberty, and that the cost had been too high. Then Fargo died and left Dredd to work that one out all on his own.

What’s happened since?

Well, Dredd has tried and failed to get the laws banning all mutants from the city repealed. His experiences in the Cursed Earth while he was looking for Fargo had strengthened his belief that such laws were unjust, and so he tried to do something about it.

But having failed, he was there personally to turn away the mutant relatives he had met on his quest, and who like him could claim descent from Fargo. He was offered a special dispensation allowing his mutated “family” to visit, but he maintained that the law must apply equally to all, or it wasn’t a law at all. Then he set about rooting out corruption and malpractice in the Cursed Earth establishments where his city’s mutants were sent.

In other words, he was given a dilemma, and he dealt with it, in character. The reader was invited to make their own judgement about whether he was doing the right thing, and we’re left to examine his motives for taking on the mutant establishments in the Cursed Earth. Guilt? Duty? Or is he trying to engineer a situation whereby he makes the ban on mutants unworkable, forcing the legislative “Council of Five” to change the law?

That would imply that the law isn’t as infallible as Dredd has always maintained, and that opens up a whole new raft of storytelling possibilities.

Worth reading?

You bet.

It’s a cliché that the essence of storytelling is conflict, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Internal conflict is all the more interesting, and we’re getting that in spades here. Dredd could be a dull, two dimensional character. But he isn’t, and he never has been (unless you count that bloody movie). There is morality in Dredd, and there is politics. There is usually an acknowledgement in the narrative that the reader not only has a brain, but that they quite like using it.

But that’s just one character.

‘Tooth is an anthology. What’s the rest of it like?

Tell you what – come back next week, and we’ll discuss it!

Well, at the moment, there’s a lot of good stuff, and for the long time readers, some welcome returns to form for old favourites – both characters and creators.

Perhaps most welcome of these is the recent return to brilliance of Pat Mills – the man who more than anyone was responsible for the creation of 2000AD.

In the seventies and eighties Mills was responsible for some of the best loved series that ‘Tooth ever had. There was the Celtic Warrior Slaine, the chaotic alien freedom fighter Nemesis the Warlock to name but two – but somehow, in the nioneties it all came unstuck and I lost all patience with him. His stories developed a depressingly preachy “new age” tone, and started to go on and on about how terrible England was when compared with the Celtic civilisations that went before.

Now, I’m an enlightened guy, and patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel and all that, but really, there is a limit. I can only stand to be told “you’re shit” so many times before I think “whatever” and move on. Let’s just say that Mills crossed that line. Several times.

His later work on the once great Slaine would be a case in point. Many (and I’d be one of them) regard Mills’ masterwork to be the epic three volume Slaine: The Horned God, which ran in 2000AD at the very end of the eighties. This was Barbarian Sword and Sorcery done right - it was intelligent, thought provoking and action packed fayre, stunningly illustrated by the (then) newcomer Simon Bisley.

It was truly magnificent stuff, and at the time I (and many others) assumed that this would be the final series featuring Slaine. He became the High King, which was a title that came with a built in death warrant – after seven years the High King was ritually sacrificed to make way for the next ruler. It seemed therefore a logical place to end his adventures.

And they really should have.

They didn’t, and almost every single story about the character since has been unbloodyreadable. Lots of pseudo new-age bollocks about the Earth Goddess and the battle between the Celtic “Red Worm” and the Saxon “White Worm”. The invading Saxons (from whom I, and the rest of the English descend) were, apparently, in league with the evil Sea Devils. Or something. Basically, unlike dredd, Slaine seems to be a character who has immatured with age.

The whole thing resurfaced in the utterly bobbins strip Finn, which brought “Finn”, first seen as a new age warrior in the ill fated comic Crisis, into the pages of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, with some new found magical abilities, and a whole bunch of conspiracy theories.

And it was Cack.

And so I’d given up on Pat Mills – he was filed with Frank Miller under “Used to be good” and forgotten about.

But now? Now he’s seriously back on form, with two utterly utterly brilliant strips, Defoe: 1666 and Greysuit.

Defoe is the sort of alternative history that has been the staple of SF and fantasy fiction since, well, since always really. We’re back in the era of the restoration. Cromwell and his New Model Army have been vanquished, the puritans no longer hold sway in England, and there is a new King on the throne.

There is also a plague of Zombies sweeping the nation which Defoe, our hero, must tackle, aided and abetted by the fantastical inventions of Sir Isaac Newton. Zombies seem to be very much the thing at the moment, but Defoe is doing more than just jumping on the bandwagon. We really are in the realms of Mills at his best here. There’s a sharp understanding of the actual history, which is twisted to make the alternate history all the more real, and a dark humour that gives the dialogue an edge. Add this to Greysuit and you have conclusive evidence of an old master returning to his pomp.

Greysuit sits very comfortably in the tradition of 2000AD, having rather a lot in common with the classic M.A.C.H. 1 character from the very early days. Back than the Man Activated by Compupuncture Hyperpower was a Bionic Man inspired government super-agent who derived his abilities from Hi-Tech “Compupuncture” (computer controlled acupuncture). He was a genuine hero who served his country and did good.

Greysuit is a good deal more subtle, and a good deal less straightforward that it’s predecessor. The “Greysuits” are a group of shadowy agents who have had their behaviour conditioned by psychological torture to mould them into perfect killing machines. Perfect assassins, they carry out their assignments without fear, compassion or conscience – the sharp edge of British diplomacy.

What happens when one such Greysuit agent begins to recover his humanity is both a traditional adventure full of the daring do and intruigue you would expect in a “boy’s own” story, and a clever, sensitive examination of what it is to be human. Unlike the ‘Tooth stories of old, the people in charge don’t have our hero’s best interests at heart – they don’t have our best interests at heart either, and they’re prepared to go to extreme lengths to ensure their own interests aren’t threatened.

This could so easily have been more conspiracy theory cobblers. Instead, Mills serves up a story in the classic 2000AD vein. On a superficial level you can read it as a straightforward action thriller and let the politics go right over your head. On the other, you can drink in the sardonic comment on modern government in the UK. As a whole generation of readers has now done, you pays your money, and you takes you choice.

Mills isn’t the only familiar face making a triumphant return to the contemporary pages of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic. Working Class Hero Savage first appeared in the early days of ‘Tooth in the strip Invasion, in which he led resistance to a Volgon (lightly veiled Soviet) invasion of the UK. The story was set in the (then) distant(ish) future of 1999, which gives the modern comic a golden opportunity to pick the story up in “real time”, and tell us what happened next.

It’s now 2007. The Volgons are in charge, occupying the UK at the “invitation” of a puppet government they installed. They have to stay, they tell the world, to protect the government and the people from “fundamentalist insurgents”. Savage, of course, has other ideas. He is one of the “fundamentalist insurgents”, fighting not because of some twisted principle, but because he feels that his country, his culture and his whole way of life are under threat.

The parallels with real life here are obvious – indeed, they’re no more subtle than the character himself, and his idea of being subtle is not to saw off the shotgun. But the characterisation is solid, and the characters themselves are utterly believable in their desire to resist the heel of the oppressor. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things – it’s the kind of narrative that ‘Tooth was built on. And it’s brilliant.

Other strips in the new ‘Tooth are also evocative of times gone by. Sam Slade, the Robohunter is still around, although now it’s Samantha Slade trying to get by with the “help” of robotics’ most useless duo, Hoagy and Stogie – possibly the most useless double act since Stan and Ollie. Like her good ole’ dad, Samantha Slade is a resourceful type, which is a good thing, because her faithful sidekicks are really more of a liability than an asset.

The humour and slapstick is as good as it ever was – as is the consistently brilliant art from 2000AD veteran Ian Gibson. I make no secret of the fact that I’d prefer to see Gibson illustrating a new volume of Halo Jones, but in the continued absence of the Hooplife Hero, I’ll settle for the consolation of some top notch Gibson art on a different strip.

Then there’s the continued delight of Nikolai Dante. It says a lot about me that I still think of him as a “new” character, when in fact he’s been around for a decade or so. Like Savage, Dante comes from an alternate reality. Unlike Savage however, which is a frighteningly realistic near future dystopia, Dante lives in a world where the pre-soviet Russian Tsars took over the world. Now, in a far future technological almost-utopia a truly flamboyant hero buckles his swash against all odds, taking on all comers.

Dante was a breath of fresh air when he first hit the pages of ‘Tooth. The bastard son of the Romanov empire, son of a pirate, babe magnet and adventurer. He is officially “too cool to kill” and has often served as light relief when ‘Tooth overall has been flirting with the darker side of storytelling.

But he is no mere clown of a character, and like Dredd has also often been used to examine important social issues. Never “in your face”, but often thought provoking, Dante perhaps epitomises the spirit of The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic as it enters true adulthood. Grown up, aware of the harsh reality of life, but not always feeling the need to take it too seriously.

I remember 2000AD celebrating becoming a teenager at the beginning of the nineties. At the time, I was coming to the end of my teens, and thought that ‘Tooth was as good as it was ever going to get. The comic’s performance over the course of the nineties served to convince me I was right.

But then, at the end of the nineties, new management in the shape of game software developers Rebellion took over and breathed new life into their ailing patient. The result has been what we have today. A giant bestriding the UK news stand like a colossus, looking forward to growing even more distinguished as it approaches middle age.

So, a big Happy Birthday to 2000AD - still the galaxy’s greatest comic!