Borag Thungg Squaxx Dek Lexxy

Just ignore the title. It's a stupid joke that I know nobody here is going to get. I still couldn't resist making it though.

It's no secret that I like comic-books. They're probably my favourite medium of story-telling. You don't need pages of dialogue to describe what's going on, but there's still plenty left to the imagination. Done right, it's the perfect author/audience collaboration. Having said that, there's a lot of shit comics out there.

In fact, the only contemporary comic I still look at regularly is 2000AD. For those who don't know, 2000AD is a weekly British anthology comic with sci-fi leanings. The stories it runs aren't always great; in fact, some of them aren't even good; but then again, quite a few of them are; and being an anthology comic, there's usually something in each issue worth reading. As an added bonus, 2000AD is probably the only major comic that sells DRM-free ebooks; meaning that you actually own the comics you buy and can download them to your computer and do what you like with them. Why is this important? Well, it means you're not tied to some online service and your whole collection doesn't disappear if your account gets terminated.

Later this year, 2000AD will reach issue #2000, and next year, the publication will turn forty. Not bad considering most other British comics that launched in the '70s were flat out lasting two years. If I have time, I'd like to go back and look at some of my favourite stories from over the years. We'll see how that pans out. In the meantime, I've got a couple of other things to talk about.

First of all, there's a "history of 2000AD" documentary out that has recently finished its rounds on the festival circuit and become available for purchase. It's called "Future Shock", and you can get it on DVD, or from iTunes, Google, Amazon, and just about everywhere else, I think. Since it's so new, and easy to get a hold of, I'm not going to link to a full version of it; but here's the first 20mins, just to give you a taste.

I really enjoyed it. As you might expect from a "talking-heads" style retrospective about a comic that started forty years ago, it's full of cantankerous old men who no longer give a shit if everyone knows exactly what they think. This is especially true for the mag's founder, Pat Mills, who is the centre-point of the film and pretty much steals the show. Thinks that caught my interest were:

• Nobody wanted to work in comics. It was seen as a stepping stone to a proper job.
• Publishers valued comic art so little that a lot of the originals were used as cutting boards, or door mats, or paper-towels, or just thrown away.
• Censors kept finding hidden cocks and other lewd material in the artwork that simply wasn't there.
• Not only did British comics creators not receive royalties, they weren't even credited for their work. In fact, there were people payed to remove signatures from artwork. This was because:
  • publishers wanted readers to be loyal to the title rather than the writers and artists.
  • they were afraid other publications would poach the talent. Ironic considering that …
• There are only two yanks in the film. One of them is a fan who comes across as a bit of a violence-obsessed wanker.
• The other one is Karen Berger, whom—for me—is one of the most important people in American comics history, having head-hunted all of 2000AD's top talent in the late '80s, and brought them to The States to work under DC's Vertigo imprint.
• The stories of conflict between artists and editors, editors and publishers, and the inter-generational struggle that nearly killed the mag.
• The artist who was behind schedule and got a fax (that his mum actually received) which simply read "Where are my pages, you cunt?"
• The artist whose story was plagiarised by a film-maker who then threatened to sue him if he didn't sign over the rights.
• Pat Mills describing his interactions with film-producers thusly: "You know when you're in your twenties and you meet somebody from Hollywood and you're like "Oh wow"; well that's bollocks. What you say is "Fuck off, how much ya gonna pay me?"; that's how you've gotta talk to these people."
• The description of most female characters in American comics as being interchangeable vehicles for giant tits.
• One former editor talking about how he begged management not to run "the most offensive ad he'd ever seen", and then being forbidden from responding to the inevitable reader outrage; describing the experience as having to stand quietly and have pies of shit thrown in his face. (ad below)

If I had to level any criticism at the film it's that the last ten minutes is a little bit too "Raa! Raa! Go team!". Apart from that, I just wish I could listen to all the interviews unedited. According to the film-makers, there's about five hours worth of gold just from Pat.

And speaking of interviews, here's a three-hour monster from one of 2000AD's most renowned writers, and the creator of Judge Dredd, John Wagner. I'm including it in its entirety, because it comes from a free podcast that's basically put out to promote the mag. I did split it into five parts, because of DailyMotion's limitations on length, but they should all play consecutively.

I half expect that this might actually be of some interest to Melba or Squib, since it's a bloke talking about his forty plus years of experience as a professional writer. Some things that I found interesting:

• A lot of the greats started off writing girls' comics.
• There was a time when girls' comics were the best written stories going. Now they don't even exist.
• In the olden days, comics were cancelled when readership fell to 200,000. Now most comics would kill for those numbers.
• He lives in the country because he wants to get away from people and dislikes going to parties. (Hmmm, sounds familiar)
• His biggest regret is that he's not going to see all the amazing things that happen to the world after he dies. (Oh come on, now he's just pinching my material)
• Actually, he kinda reminds me of some of my old old rellies who were still alive when I was young. It may just be the Scottish burr and left-leaning politics though.
• When he writes, he makes a list of all the elements he wants to include in the story. Most interestingly, when he writes a Dredd story, he usually includes these two items:
  1. Dredd is hero.
  2. More importantly, Dredd is villain.

As a little extra bonus, I thought I'd chuck in the intro from one of Wagner's Dredd strips. It's not a famous story, but I think these five and a half pages sum up the style and content pretty neatly. Personally, I really like the humour.

Click thumbnail to view larger image.