The 90s nearly killed 2000AD. It didn't work.
Last week we established that 2000AD was one of the most important talent factories in comics history. This week we need to talk about what happened after the talent left.
The short version: the 1990s were rough, a Sylvester Stallone film did not help, and the comic spent a decade trying to figure out who it was without the generation of writers who had defined it.
The longer version is more interesting - because the longer version ends with 2000AD in 2026 being, by any reasonable measure, genuinely excellent.
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The British invasion of American comics that 2000AD enabled was, from 2000AD's perspective, a bit of a disaster.
Alan Moore left for DC in 1983 after his work on Warrior and a few strips for 2000AD caught Karen Berger's attention. Neil Gaiman followed. Grant Morrison followed. The artists went too - Bolland, Gibbons, McMahon, all pulled toward American page rates that made the British market embarrassing by comparison.
What they left behind was a comic with a strong identity and a suddenly thin bench. The late 1980s and early 1990s produced some extraordinary work - Zenith by Morrison and Steve Yeowell, Halo Jones by Moore and Ian Gibson - but the centre couldn't hold. Judge Dredd remained the anchor, but Wagner and Mills were increasingly pulling in different directions from what the corporate owners wanted.
The corporate situation deserves its own paragraph. IPC sold 2000AD to Fleetway in 1987, which was acquired by Egmont in 1991. In 1999, after years of cost-cutting and dwindling circulation, the comic was sold again - this time to Rebellion, a small Oxford-based video game developer that had recently released the Aliens vs. Predator game and wanted the IP rights to the 2000AD back catalogue for licensing purposes.
Nobody expected Rebellion to be a good steward. They turned out to be a great one.
The Stallone years. In between all of this, in 1995, Hollywood came calling. A Judge Dredd film starring Sylvester Stallone was released, featuring - and this detail cannot be stressed enough - Dredd removing his helmet to reveal his face, something that is anathema to longtime 2000AD fans. John Wagner, creator of a character whose face is never shown because "justice has no soul," watched this happen and was not pleased.
The film was not good. It made $113 million on a $90 million budget, which is technically not a failure while still being a long way from a success. It did nothing to boost the comic's circulation, which had been declining through the mid-1990s as the British newsstand market contracted.
The better Dredd film came in 2012. Dredd, starring Karl Urban and Olivia Thirlby, with a screenplay by Alex Garland, was a low-budget, hyper-violent, genuinely faithful adaptation that kept Dredd's helmet on throughout. It was a critical success that underperformed at the box office because the distributor didn't know how to market it. Wagner loved it. The cult following it has accumulated since has been a quiet gift to the 2000AD brand.
What Rebellion actually did. Rather than stripping the IP and licensing everything to death, Rebellion hired editors who cared, worked to bring back original creators, and allowed the comic to develop a new generation of writers alongside returning veterans. They digitised the archive, launched a subscription service, and built a genuine relationship with the 2000AD reader community.
The current editorial team has managed something genuinely difficult: maintaining the weekly anthology format that makes 2000AD what it is, while publishing work that doesn't feel like nostalgia. New strips exist alongside Dredd. New writers and artists are developing in exactly the way Moore and Morrison did in the 1980s. The "Future Shocks" tradition - short, one-off twist stories that have always served as the proving ground for new talent - continues.
The talent pipeline now. If you want to know where the next generation of important British comics creators is being trained, the answer is still, remarkably, the same place it was in 1977. Rob Williams, Al Ewing, Kek-W, TC Eglington, Rachael Stott, Colin MacNeil - the roster of current 2000AD contributors includes people doing the best work of their careers alongside people who are clearly at the beginning of something significant.
The weekly format is the key. American comics, moving to the monthly pamphlet model and then to the trade paperback, have largely given up on the anthology. 2000AD never did. The result is a forcing function: shorter stories, faster craft development, the discipline of doing more with less. The writers who grew up reading it and now write for it are, in some ways, the most technically skilled storytellers currently working in English-language comics.
Where they stand now. 2000AD is not a mainstream publication. It doesn't reach the audiences it once did, and it probably never will - the newsagent distribution network it depended on largely doesn't exist anymore. But it is a working, sustainable, genuinely creative operation that has outlasted most of the industry that once surrounded it.
That a weekly British science fiction anthology, launched in 1977 with a free space spinner and an alien editor, is still producing work of genuine quality in 2025, while the companies that once dwarfed it in circulation have variously folded, been acquired, or hollowed themselves out chasing IP licensing deals - is one of the stranger stories in comics publishing.
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