2000AD: The Comic That Shouldn't Exist
**Quick note: Having basically learnt to read with Asterix and Tintin, 2000AD was my first real foray into comics, so I have a particular affinity for it. I was 9 years old, had just started boarding school in England, and needed something to cling on to… and the weekly trips to Forbidden Planet in Bristol became that thing. Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper all became friends, so diving into the history and impact that 2000AD has had over the past 50 years is deeply personal to me: hopefully it will inspire a similar interest in you as well.
There's a comic published every week in Britain that has been running continuously since February 1977. It has launched more significant comics careers than any single publication in history. It invented a satirical fascist cop as its flagship character, used an alien as its editor, and gave away a free space spinner with its first issue to boost sales.
It is called 2000AD, it is genuinely one of the strangest and most important publications in the history of the medium, and if you're American there's a reasonable chance you've never read it - even though a ton of writers and artists you love in modern comics learned their craft there first.
Pat Mills did not set out to create a comic that would reshape an industry. He set out to create something that would sell to British kids in 1977, when science fiction was suddenly everywhere (Star Wars had just happened, Close Encounters was incoming), and IPC Magazines wanted a weekly anthology to capitalise on it.
The brief was commercial. The result was anything but.
Mills assembled a team of writers and artists, many of whom had survived the chaotic, controversial run of Action - the comic that had spent a year gleefully ripping off Dirty Harry, Jaws, and Dirty Harry again, and had been quietly strangled by its own publisher when it attracted too much attention from the tabloids. These were people who had learned, the hard way, that you could get away with a lot if you moved fast and kept the editors distracted.
The new comic needed a lead character. Mills's writing partner John Wagner suggested a cop - not a regular cop, but one taken to such an extreme that the concept became satire. A judge who was also jury, executioner, and one-man police force, operating in a dystopian future city so overcrowded and crime-ridden that normal law enforcement had stopped making any sense. They called him Judge Dredd, after the reggae artist (with one letter changed to avoid legal trouble).
The task of drawing him went to Carlos Ezquerra, a Spanish artist working in the British market who had previously worked with Mills on war comics. Ezquerra came back with something nobody expected - a figure so futuristic, so loaded with zips and chains and body armour, that the near-future setting originally intended for the strip stopped making sense. Mills simply moved the whole world further into the future to match what Ezquerra had drawn.
There was one problem. The original first Dredd story - written by Wagner and drawn by Ezquerra - was vetoed by IPC's board of directors as too violent. Wagner, furious that a proposed buyout that would have given him and Mills a financial stake in the new comic had fallen through, quit. Ezquerra, when he discovered his art for the first Dredd story had been given to another artist (Mike McMahon, who drew the eventual debut in Prog 2 on 5 March 1977), also quit.
So the comic launched without its most important character's creators involved. And it was an immediate hit anyway.
The alien editor gambit was pure Mills. Tharg the Mighty - an alien from the star Betelgeuse, who would answer readers' letters from his "Nerve Centre" and refer to comics as "Thrills" and readers as "Earthlets" - gave the comic a mythology, a personality, and an in-joke that has run unbroken for nearly fifty years. It was also a useful legal fiction: "Tharg" could say things no human editor would dare, because technically no human editor had said them.
The early strips were a deliberate exercise in eclecticism. Harlem Heroes - jetpack-wearing futuristic athletes - sat alongside Flesh - time-travelling dinosaur hunters - alongside Invasion - a thinly disguised Soviet occupation of Britain - alongside the relaunched Dan Dare, borrowed from the beloved 1950s Eagle comic for instant name recognition. Most were ludicrous. Some were brilliant. All of them were unlike anything else on British newsstands.
Ezquerra and Wagner eventually came back. And once they did, the strip became something genuinely extraordinary - a long-form satire of Thatcherite Britain, Reagan-era America, the justice system, celebrity culture, and authoritarianism, wearing the costume of an action comic for kids. The Mega-City One stories, at their best, were doing things no mainstream American comic was close to attempting.
The talent factory nobody planned. What makes 2000AD historically significant isn't just the stories. It's who it trained.
Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison wrote there. Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Brendan McCarthy, Glenn Fabry, Steve Dillon, Jock, Andy Diggle - all moved from 2000AD to DC and Marvel reads like a who’s who list for mainstream American comics.
DC editor Karen Berger noticed. In the wake of Alan Moore's transformative run on Swamp Thing Berger systematically recruited British writers for DC. The result was the Vertigo imprint: Sandman, Hellblazer, Preacher, Transmetropolitan, Y: The Last Man. The creative revolution in American comics in the late 1980s and 1990s was, to a remarkable degree, a 2000AD alumni association funded by the British newsagent market.
The comic itself? Nearly died several times, but survived a hostile corporate takeover, the collapse of the British newsstand market, and the death of most of its contemporaries. As of 2024, of all the British comics competing for shelf space in 1977, only The Beano, Commando, and 2000AD are still publishing. It is now owned by Rebellion, a video game company, which turns out to have been exactly the kind of unconventional owner it needed.
Next week: what happened after the glory years, why the 1990s nearly killed it, and why 2000AD right now is as good as it's ever been.
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