2000AD #2000

2000AD #2000 (2016)
Considering how far back I go with 2000AD, it would have been weird to not buy this two-thousandth issue as I noticed it there on the racks in Barnes & Noble; and it would have felt weird not to write about it, so here I am.

My first issue was #20, cover dated 9th of July, 1977 and costing eight pence from Bradley's newsagent in the square in Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire, England. This issue cost nine dollars before tax and was purchased here in San Antonio, Texas.

What a long, strange journey it has been.

I bought my first 2000AD on Monday the 4th of July. I was eleven-years old. It clearly made a huge impression on me because on the following Saturday I note in my diary:

Today I bought birthday presents for James and Nicholas in Stratford and got for myself the 2000AD summer special in Stratford.

Then on the Monday:

Not much at school but when I got home I got another 2000AD comic and saw Clapperboard on TV about the film Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

On Thursday the 14th of July, I wrote:

Today I swapped some copies of Topper for some 2000AD comics with Peter Empson. Now I only need four back issues to complete the set.

Curiosity had quickly flared up into obsession leading to what didn't seem so much like a hobby as a whole new way of life, and on the following Monday I wrote:

I hate Nationwide because they said things against 2000AD comic. They're not very nice.

I stayed with the thing more or less on and off until about 1993. There was a large gap around the start of the eighties whilst I discovered punk rock, admittedly three years later than everyone else and coinciding with a run of unusually shite stories such as Meltdown Man and Mean Arena. Then a friend filled in this gap a couple of years later by giving me all of his back issues. They had been soaked, transformed into a column of papier mâché by the pipes bursting in his student accommodation. He was about to chuck the lot, but I took them and spent the next few months drying them out, two issues at a time on the radiator. Once the things were dry enough to read, I realised the comic had picked up somewhat after I'd jumped ship so I started buying it again. I'm not even sure what drove me away in 1993, but it may have been a combination of a girlfriend entering the picture and Armoured Gideon.

I hadn't bought one since, not until right now. I've probably browsed here and there but never saw anything which really grabbed me, and 2000AD was never really a casual read. It was something you collected or you didn't bother; and this situation is strangely akin to my own father reading a copy of Eagle in the year 1999 in some alternate universe where the thing never got cancelled and my dad continue to read comics into adulthood, just like me.

Firstly, it's sort of comforting to see we're still running with the affectation of this being a comic edited by an alien for the benefit of earthlets, and an alien who continues to describe his own work as zarjaz; and it's additionally comforting to detect no trace of irony in this conceit. We have a Judge Dredd strip which requires just twelve pages to team him up with Johnny Alpha, then send them both to the future to defeat a troop of Judge Cal clones. It's fucking stupid and yet characteristically wonderful and a good illustration of what has made this comic great even before we've considered the consistently wonderful art of Carlos Ezquerra. Pat Mills reunites with Kevin O'Neill for a slightly bewildering but nevertheless welcome Nemesis strip. There's linking material from Mike McMahon amongst others, then Rogue Trooper and Anderson, Psi Division - strips which historically had their moments, but never quite became favourites for me, and here fail to change my mind on that score - although it's still nice to see them.

The weird thing at this point was the familiarity of it all, concepts and characters all seemingly dating from my era. They must have come up with something during the last two decades, surely?

There's Sinister Dexter, whatever that may be, then a new strip from Pete Milligan, and they're okay but I'm probably going to stick to catching up with collected editions of the stuff I liked. It's been great to reconnect but I guess it's just not my comic any more, and nor has it been for a while. It did it's job. It raised me and probably changed the face of comics, albeit indirectly. It set me where I am today by some means or other, wherever that is. It's good just to know that it still exists, still works for whoever is reading it, and continues to spread the gospel of causing trouble and ruffling feathers. May it endure for at least another forty years.

Enigma

Peter Milligan & Duncan Fegredo Enigma (1993)
I bought this at the time but missed a few crucial issues, which rendered the whole enterprise more or less incomprehensible, although I was nevertheless left with the vague impression of a quality piece of work; and so here I am again with the collected version, complete with an introduction in which Grant Morrissey bangs on about his famous friend Peter Milligan proving that there's still plenty to be done with the superhero genre if you have a bit of imagination, contrary to the claims of certain people who think they're really ace but they aren't, not mentioning no names or nuffink...

Digested in just a couple of sittings, it becomes quickly obvious why I recall Enigma as incomprehensible, namely that it really does work more like a novel than a comic book in the traditional sense - a graphic novel, if you will. The information is too gradual to build and too reliant on a cumulative understanding to be be split into eight monthly helpings punctuated by real life. Digested in this form, the build up is magnificent - a truly peculiar story of seemingly imaginary characters from a slightly odd comic book breaking out into the real world whilst potentially serving as metaphors for repressed sexuality and all the guilt which comes with it. It's weird yet feels rooted in our reality - probably for the sake of contrast - and Duncan Fegredo's artwork is gorgeous, possibly the best thing he's ever drawn.

Then Milligan sort of blows it in the last chapter - or issue eight of the original series if you prefer - with a conclusion equivalent to revealing that all this strange stuff happened when Morgan the Mystic messed up some spells and let Quargon the Incorrigible loose in our universe, thus reducing all which has gone before to David Blaine drawing an eye on the palm of his hand and silently showing it to Eamonn Holmes whilst pulling an enigmatic expression in answer to some question or other. Of course, this may well be the very thing which caused Grant Morrissey to fulminate about the daringly audacious bolditude of his famous friend Peter Milligan, but to me it reads like Peter just couldn't even be arsed to say it was all a dream or whatever. In other words, he spends eight issues establishing that this place is the real world whilst pulling the same mysterious faces as David Blaine, and the punchline is that it isn't.

'Wouldn't you say that's pretty weird?' he croons to his readers with a flashlight held beneath his chin so as to create a spooky effect, one eyebrow raised in homage to all the usual suspects.

Dunno.

'Spose so.

Rogan Gosh: Star of the East

Peter Milligan & Brendan McCarthy
Rogan Gosh: Star of the East (1990)

Revolver was another one of those 2000AD spin-off comics which came and went back in the nineties. It lasted seven issues and, brushing up on Wikipedia, I realise that I have absolutely no memory of at least half of its contents. I remember the name Happenstance & Kismet, but not Fighting Figurines - whatever the hell that was, nor Dire Streets, which looks horrible. I have the impression that Revolver was instituted in response to the then prevalent subcultural premise of the sixties having been like a really amaaaaaaazing time, yeah? which additionally served to launch a million terrible bands. Grant Morrison's version of Dan Dare appeared in Revolver, and I quite liked that, and there was some sort of biographical strip about Jimi Hendrix which probably worked better for people who care about Jimi Hendrix, and then there was Rogan Gosh, which I didn't really understand.

It's painted by Brendan McCarthy so you can't really blame me for revisiting this one. I still don't understand it, but then I don't think I'm supposed to. The narrative is impressionist rather than realist, and may as well be considered as nothing deeper than an excuse to have a certain quota of Brendan McCarthy pages assembled in the same place. There's an afterword offering explanations about how Rogan Gosh isn't a linear story - which funnily enough I'm sure most of us noticed - but it reads like whining excuses invoking dogs eating homework tagged on at last minute when someone realised that Milligan hadn't actually bothered to write a story, and it particularly reads that way when he invokes Einstein, Bohr, and Schrödinger.

Give me a break.

Nevertheless I'm a big boy, and I can handle impressionism and abstract narratives splattered across the page with a logic closer to music than writing. I've read William Burroughs, and so Rogan Gosh sort of works providing you keep in mind that the words are no more an explanation of what's going on with the pictures than they can be considered representative of any deep insight into the illusory nature of reality. Like most of the stuff we've bothered to remember of the sixties, Rogan Gosh spends a lot of time selecting which books to leave casually scattered across its coffee table prior to your arrival, and oh - there you are at the door - on goes the record: second track, side two so it doesn't look too obvious.

Come in.

This?

Oh they were called the Vanilla Tea Kettle. You probably haven't heard of them. I listen to this album a lot.

Still, as something pretty much inviting its readers to BYOS*, Rogan Gosh is nevertheless enjoyable thanks to the art and the occasional flash of snappy dialogue. It slightly bothers me how this apparent attempt to engage with Indian culture is centred around a man named after a fucking curry, and for pretty much the same reason that Kula Shaker's continuing to draw breath bothers me, although this aspect is addressed a little way into the story, albeit not very convincingly; but providing you keep in mind that Rogan Gosh isn't really about Indian culture so much as it's about our slightly clueless reaction to the same - albeit possibly not deliberately - you should be okay.

*: Bring Your Own Story.

Swamp Thing: Raise Them Bones

Scott Snyder, Yanick Paquette & others
Swamp Thing: Raise Them Bones (2012)
Following on from my finding Peter Milligan's Red Lanterns borderline unreadable, it was proposed to me that I might direct my gaze elsewhere in DC Comics' newly reinvented cosmology, specifically to the Scott Snyder version of Swamp Thing.

'It's not as good as Alan Moore's Swamp Thing,' my informant told me, 'but it's better than the Mark Millar version.'

So here we are.

In case anyone missed the memo, DC Comics have been doing this sort of thing for a while, regularly rebooting its entire cast of characters back to their own year zero so as to avoid the ludicrous situation of anyone finding themselves required to draw Batman falling asleep in front of Countdown and not shitting himself before he's made it to the lavatory. I'm still not sure what to make of this development, although as I barely read the things these days my opinion would in any case probably be worthless. I was a massive fan of the version of this title which ran throughout the eighties and some of the nineties as written by Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, Doug Wheeler and others, and I can't really see that anything is likely to improve upon those issues. Apparently Swamp Thing has been revived twice since then, by which point I'd wandered off in another direction; and now here we all are, back to the beginning once more. Except it isn't exactly back to the beginning because it tells a story at the same sort of tangent to its earlier self as tends to arise from Hollywood adaptations. Similar situations and characters emerge seeming less like reinvention than someone playing with Alan Moore's toy box - the parliament of trees, the defender of the green as foretold by prophecy, broken necked chaps with their heads facing backwards, and so on. So it all feels at least a little familiar, even referencing what went before in obtuse acknowledgement of everything having returned to year zero, but all joined together in an unfamiliar configuration. Abigail Arcane has had a haircut, and she turns up on a motorbike with a shotgun which she points at the bad guy whilst growling you don't have to do this. Somehow it feels like a bad fit, given that Abigail Arcane probably isn't quite so essential to the founding mythology of Swamp Thing as, for example, is Lois Lane to that of Superman; but maybe I'm just too ingrained with the previous version of the story. Maybe I need to let go.

Actually, the story as spread across the seven issues of the comic collected here does seem to have a pace and dynamic closer to certain Hollywood conventions than was the case with the previous incarnation - just to squeeze out my penultimate winnet of objection-poo; but, for what it is, taking the new Swamp Thing on its own terms and ignoring the recycling, this is a more than decent effort. Excepting the intermittently wonky faces drawn by Marco Rudy for the fourth issue, the art is mostly fucking fantastic, and the writing is mostly pretty darn great, despite my reservations regarding some of the plot across which that writing is draped. I suppose, most importantly, the horror is at least as horrible as anything from Moore's run, which is after all the point of this title.

So yes, possibly better than Mark Millar's Swamp Thing - which I liked a great deal as it happens - and not quite up to Alan Moore standards, and whilst I have some minor reservations, this is a very respectable effort and an absolute pleasure to read.

Red Lanterns: Blood and Rage

Peter Milligan, Ed Benes & Rob Hunter
Red Lanterns: Blood and Rage (2012)
There used to be a couple of DC comics of which I was quite fond way back in the mists of time - the Keith Giffen version of Justice League, Blue Devil, the New Teen Titans when Marv Wolfman was writing - but I've never been that deeply entrenched within DC mythology, and have always found myself bewildered by all that stuff about Guardians, Monitors, and going back to year zero every five years just in case anyone notices how Superman has been a teenager since 1930 and thus decides that this detracts from the staunch realism of the character. So I have no idea what the hell is supposed to have happened here. I have a vague knowledge of the Green Lanterns being some sort of super-powered intergalactic police force, but that's about it.

A couple of months ago, Junior - who is eleven - began to babble about the Red Lanterns during long car journeys, as ever predicating his monologue on the premise that people in their forties share most of his interests and will therefore give a shit about Minecraft and whatever other combination of noise and flashing lights he's adopted as self-brainwashing strategy of choice this week. I assumed these Red Lanterns to be either the wrong end of some stick he'd grasped at school, or a pointless console game variation on characters fondly remembered from Keith Giffen's Justice League.

Then I saw this in the book store and bought it out of curiosity, and because I remember liking a few things Pete Milligan wrote for 2000AD and Vertigo; which, if nothing else, impressed the living shit out of Junior who, so far as I understand it, had only experienced this stuff indirectly as the testimony of kids he admires in his class. So it turns out that several car journeys worth of verbal diarrhoea centred upon Red Lanterns, Green Lanterns, and even Yellow Lanterns is more or less on point thanks to yet another reboot of the DC universe; and just as Junior claims, they all have a motto, and the Red Lanterns are fuelled by rage, and one of them is a cat - or at least a cat as drawn by someone who has drawn a hell of a lot of grimacing superheroes but maybe not so many cats.

I say I remember liking a few things by Pete Milligan, but I suppose I mean mainly Bix Barton, Johnny Nemo, and his run on DC's Animal Man. I loved Shade the Changing Man at one point, but then went back for a re-read whilst working out which runs of comics I should flog on eBay in order to finance my moving to the United States, and I couldn't actually get through the first issue. It was Kathy's boyfriend I found objectionable, a black man whose role was apparently limited to getting killed by a stereotypical racist redneck from the deep south in order to upset everybody and legitimise traumatic experience as a substitute for character in the hope that no-one would notice it wasn't so much a story as a series of clichés strung together by someone apparently assuming that Deliverance had been a documentary describing the daily lives of everyone south of the Mason-Dixon. It struck me as nasty, cynical, lazy, and manipulative, even without the clumsy paradox of a hopefully anti-racist subtext based around an arguably racist reduction of this particular character to a one-dimensional human sacrifice.

Sadly, there's some of that here in this volume collecting the first seven issues of the comic. The Red Lanterns appear to be instruments of some sort of universal justice motivated by blind rage and the desire for revenge. Each of them became a Red Lantern after something terrible was done to them - and so we have more variations on Kathy's boyfriend slaughtered by a redneck serial killer in order to justify this, and it feels mostly just as cheap and obvious. Most of the revenge origin flashbacks star alien creatures in obviously fictitious environments which, oddly, doesn't really diminish the element of schlock horror despite there being nothing quite so close to home as in that first issue of Shade. One character turns out to have been an evil fucker prior to himself being wronged and thus set on the path of revenge, prompting some unconvincing philosophising about vengeance as a matter of cosmic balance beyond any moral concerns, roughly the sort of thing Boyd Rice keeps banging on about when not having his picture taken with white supremacists because he thinks it's funny, or wants us to think that he thinks it's funny, or whatever.

The art of Red Lanterns is competent in so much as it's the usual Rob Liefeld with a couple of life drawing classes under his belt - grimacing mouths full of sharp teeth, massive beach-ball tits, excessive perspective, a ton of cross-hatching, and everyone with the face of some guy who has been trying and failing to do a poo for at least the past two weeks. I suppose it's okay for what it is, except the previously mentioned cat doesn't really look much like a cat, and regular human civilian characters all seem uncomfortable in regular clothes, like they're missing the spandex and capes the artist would have preferred to draw.

Superhero comics have become a foreign country for me, and I couldn't find much to love about this one. It's kind of silly, which would be fine if it were for kids, I suppose, except I can't even tell whether it is or not, whether I'm the target audience or it's Junior, who clearly seems to love the thing. It has the narrative simplicity of something aimed at his age group, scattered with details which would suggest a much older target audience, and specifically somewhat gory details. The combination of the overly elaborate art and portentous first person narrative captions seems either misjudged or extraordinarily pretentious, and actually make me a little nostalgic for the days of ridiculous thinky clouds about how Louise sure is swell but must never find out that by night I wield the sword stalwart of Galaxy Knight!

I suppose it is what it is, and I suppose I've seen worse, but Red Lanterns seems somewhat lacking in redeeming features.