2000 AD, Prog 227, 29 August 1981

 

Borag thungg, earthlets!  Amongst the stuff I found in that box of old magazines from the spare room that I investigated before Christmas, were a couple of issues of 2000 AD comic from the early eighties. Quite how, or why, those two issues survived, out of God only knows how many hundred I must have had at one time, I have no idea.  Anyway, this is the 29 August 1981 issue (or 'Prog' to use the publication's own nomenclature) of the weekly comic.  Like most British comics of the era, it was printed on cheap newsprint, complete with ragged edges to the pages, where they had been cut from the continuous newsprint roll they were produced on.  Also in common  with other British comics of the time, only the front and back covers and the centre spread were printed in colour.  For this issue, the cover illustrates the concluding episode of 'Meltdown Man', a strip about an eyepatch-sporting Snake Plissken-type ex-SAS guy who finds himself projected, via a nuclear explosion, into a dystopian future world, where a human elite ruled over human-animal hybrids created by genetic engineering.  The centre spread is devoted - as it usually was at this time - to the first two pages of the  'Judge Dredd' strip, in this case an episode of the 'Judge Death Lives' story, illustrated by Brian Bolland (one of the best, in my opinion, artists working in British comic strips at this time).

The rest of the issue is filled out with episodes of  'Strontium Dog', 'Nemesis the Warlock' and future sport story 'The Mean Arena'.  There was also the regular readers' letters page - 'Nerve Centre' - presided over by The Mighty Tharg, a two page feature on the TV version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was then showing on BBC2, with the back cover devoted to readers' illustrations of various 2000 AD characters.  The inside back cover is taken up with two announcements related to the comic itself: an advert for the upcoming 2000 AD Annual 1982 and an announcement that, from the next issue, 'Rogue Trooper' would be replacing 'Meltdown Man'.  Another inside page consists of adverts for two other of IPC Magazine's  publications: Roy of the Rovers and Shoot!, the former being a football-themed comic featuring the titular long-running character, the latter a football themed magazine aimed at teenagers.  'Roy of the Rovers', of course, had originally been a strip in another football comic, but became sufficiently popular that he got his own comic, something that 'Judge Dredd' was on the verge of emulating.  Indeed, such was Dredd's popularity by this time, that his name is featured on the cover, with the comic's full title being 2000 AD Featuring Judge Dredd during this period.  Whilst I loved 2000 AD in my mid-teens, I have to admit that I hadn't been reading it right from the beginning - at that time I was still an Action! reader, but jumped ship when that title was subsumed by Battle Picture Weekly.  At the end of the day, I preferred to read a comic devoted entirely to science fiction than one devoted entirely to war stories.  (Ironically, I'd shifted allegiances to Action! after Valiant had been absorbed by Battle, preferring a mix of adventure stories to war stories - and I was only reading Valiant because it had been amalgamated with TV21).  So there you have it, a fairly typical issue of 2000 AD from the early eighties.  Splundig Vur Thrigg!, as the Mighty Tharg might say.