(J' Ominous music)
(Man 1) 'Once the '70s hit,
'and you started seeing things weren't going to be hippy-dippy
'and flowers in the hair and love-peace man
'and the Charles Manson gang had massacred Sharon Tate...
'No, that died in the '60s.'
(Man 2) 'Britain in the late '70s was a troubled country to say the least.
'We'd had major political tensions,
'there was also a lot of dissatisfaction amongst the young,
'many of whom were unemployed
'and perhaps seeing little future for themselves.'
(Man 3) 'We'd just come out of power cuts and strikes
'and it was really horrible,
'with bin bags piling up on the streets and really ugly clothes.'
(Man 4) 'Of course. it was the Queen's Silver Jubilee.
'There was this feeling of a clash of cultures, I think, around.
'There was the feeling of
'the established order being ready to be overthrown
'and new stuff coming up from below.'
(f Punk rock music)
Comics in the '70s, particularly boys comics,
were going through a really bad time.
They weren't selling very well.
"'Lion", "Jet" and "Valiant" were becoming increasingly silly'
and they were losing their way.
Up until then, comics had been written
by people who really didn't want to be writing comics,
they wanted to be writing proper novels or articles for proper magazines.
The artists really wanted to be proper magazine illustrators
who were largely slumming it in comics.
The editors were all waiting till they could get into a proper job
like editing "Practical Gardening".
It was a pretty bleak period.
A lot of people... Certainly there wasn't an expectation of growth
or the market developing in the way that it subsequently did.
You had a story in "Jet" called "Paddy McGinty's Goat".
'So it's about a boy who looks like an Enid Blyton character
'who goes around with his goat who is actually an alien!
'What ten-year-old red-blooded boy is going to be fascinated by that?'
I think I've actually sort of erased it from my mind
because it's just so awful.
And I wrote some of those stories because that was what people wanted.
(Man 5) "'Wham", "Smash", "Pow", "Fantastic" and "Terrific",'
and you had a really interesting mash up
of things like Leo Baxendale-inspired strips,
'like "Grimly Feendish" and "The Man from B.U.N.G.L.E."'
'and a very odd one called "Rubber Man", cursed by an Indian fakir,'
who was very stretchy.
It literally was rotting my brain. I'm really convinced it was.
If you think about it, if you're writing complete crap day in day out,
it is going to have an effect on you.
Pat is such a workaholic
and if you're going to work with him, you've got to keep to his pace.
John and I realised we could actually clean up,
'so we produced all sorts of stories and we sold nearly everything.'
I couldn't carry on writing this rubbish
so I had to actually create my own vehicles.
"Action" of course tapped into all the movies that kids couldn't see at the time,
like "Jaws" and "Rollerball" and "Dirty Harry".
'Pat Mills and his team of creators said,
"'Let's give them the boiled-down essence of these movies
"'but also give them an extra twist
"'and particularly push the outsider hero, the underdog,'
"as an identifying figure for kids."
I wanted it to be a comic of the streets and it became this rollercoaster,
because it was incredibly successful because of its savagery,
but also because it was saying that to the establishment,
and the establishment recognised that we were saying that
and they retaliated.
So they looked for an opportunity and they didn't have to wait too long.
"Action" comic was mostly contemporary stories,
quite a level of ultra-violence going on in it.
I mean it was the '70s, that's what a lot of culture was like.
'You only needed to look at the sheer level of nihilism and brutality
'in culture at the time.'
I particularly like writing violence,
so there is always a lot of violence in my stories, because it's fun.
There was this cover: "Kids Rule O.K.!".
'So you've got a kid swinging a bicycle chain,
'which is risky enough in the first place, beautifully drawn by Carlos Ezquerra,
'and there is a guy lying on the ground looking up at this kid.
'Near the guy is a policeman's helmet.
'But then the colourist, who I'd like to strangle,
'paints the guy in the suit blue and paints the copper's helmet blue
'so it looks like there is a policeman on the ground,'
and I went, "Oh my God,"
and they said, "Hey we've got a really cool cover here.
"We've even shocked Pat Mills!" And I was thinking, "Oh, fuck!"
Well those were very funny times in England.
It was Mary Whitehouse trying to save the souls of everybody
and it was a cover, it just said, "The Kids Rule!"
The day "Action" got banned,
there were kids running down the high street.
They said "'Action's got banned, 'Action's got banned!"
It was an event for kids
that this comic that they had really gotten into
'had been banned.'
It was the sort of slightly misguided prototype
that allowed "2000AD" to exist
and I think in that regard, it is extraordinarily important.
"2000AD" was a retreat and I knew it was a retreat.
For me personally, there is a lot of regret
that we have to retreat into science fiction
to be able to say something.
(Pat Mills) 'What happened was that'
Kelvin Gosnell had read an article in the "Evening Standard"
'which said that "Star Wars" was going to be huge,'
but to do a science fiction comic was a very risky thing,
because it's worth knowing that things like "TV 21" had died,
"Eagle" had died
'and there was a reaction from the readers.'
In other words, they often saw science fiction,
with some justification, as being a bit silly.
Pat Mills really, for his model, wasn't looking at America.
He didn't look at the superhero material, he doesn't like superheroes.
'He was looking much more to France
'where you had magazines that began around '75 or so, like "Metal Hurlant",'
where artists like Moebius had done spectacular, visionary science fiction,
'science fantasy material
'unlike anything seen anywhere in the world at that time.'
The people that I chose to work on the comic
had to have a certain, what shall we say...
...counter culture attitude.
We were this gang of reprobates
dropped right down in the middle of this totally conservative comic group
which had done things its own way for many, many years.
The "2000AD" offices were literally
'a couple of desks and a filing cabinet in a corner.
'Pat was full of energy, full of enthusiasm,
'full of colourful language,'
which I think, again, was a bit of a shock to the other people on the floor.
But a man of huge enthusiasm.
In the building we were hated,
'because we were there to usurp the role of the existing boys comic structure'
and understandably they didn't like it.
But the way we saw it, it was their own fault
'because they let their comics fall into such a poor state.'
It wasn't just that we were doing stuff that they didn't like,
'but we enjoyed doing stuff that they didn't like.'
(Pat Mills) 'The more they tried to push things down,
'the more I kind of worked against it,'
and that actually is responsible for a lot of the energy that "2000AD" has,
which the readers have responded to
and was recycled in so many ways over the decades.
They had various titles in mind,
but the one that came out eventually was "2000AD",
which, in 1977, was 23 years into the future.
Far enough into the future for IPC to be confident
that the comic would definitely not last until 2000 AD.
I just knew that everything had to be good,
primarily because there were so many people who were wishing us bad,
who really wanted this comic to crash.
(f Punk rock music)
People thought, because we were a science fiction comic,
we were going to be rather nice and middle-class,
and boy, were they in for a shock.
(I Punk rock music continues)
It was dangerous. I was a bit scared about it.
I could feel my brain just going,
"'I don't understand this, what's going on?"'
It was an assault on the senses.
For a nine-year-old boy, it was life-changing.
It was like you hear '60s rock musicians dropping acid for the first time
'and having their horizon suddenly explode outwards.'
Because it was so edgy, you didn't quite know
what was going to happen with it.
It took those risks, and there was a welcoming audience
just busting to have something to relate to.
I loved the art: Ezquerra and Cam Kennedy and Bolland and Kevin O'Neill.
'They were just the coolest things I'd ever seen.'
(Man) 'Once I saw "2000AD", I decided I wanted to draw comics for a living,'
so I've totally got "2000AD" to thank or to blame, I'm not sure what.
To me it was just this small little independent thing that kicked ass
'and I felt like I could really identify with what they had going on.'
I'm buying it for "Halo Jones",
'the glorious twisted social commentary of "Dredd"
'and for the madness and the glory of "D.R. & Quinch".'
(I Punk rock winds down)
When "2000AD" came out, the readers loved it.
'It was the biggest hit that juvenile comics had had
'for a very, very long time.'
We sold, I think, around 200,000 copies in the first week.
I very quickly realised that, for me, Pat Mills was the man.
I just thought that his imagination was quite incredible
and the concepts and characters he was coming up with really appealed to me.
I was treating the readers as equals and saying,
"I'm not going to talk down to you, I'm going to reflect what you want.
"Obviously I'm going to give it my own subversive spin
"because that's important to my soul."
There were no rules written down, you just wrote or drew what you wanted to,
and you wouldn't have thought so,
but it did become a recipe for success for "2000AD".
We enjoy pushing it to the edge. That's the only way things move forward.
Shake it up a little bit, go a bit too far, you know.
Then go a bit further. (Chuckles)
(Pat Mills) 'The publisher said to me,
"'Write a story about a Russian invasion of Britain.
"'Include...," he said, "...a scene.
"'Have Margaret Thatcher shot on the steps of Saint Paul's Cathedral."'
I said, "John, I think I could get into this story, you know?"
A paper which is now right behind graphic novels, the "Guardian"...
Back in those days, they'd do anything to cut our legs off.
The "Guardian" rang me up, John lzzard, and said,
"These Volgans... They're Russians aren't they?"
And I said, "No, no, no, they're Volgans."
"But they've got Russian uniforms." I said, "They're just totalitarian guys."
And he said, "But there is a River Volga in Russia."
I said "Yeah, but there is a Volga Republic in Africa."
He said, "Yeah but they're not black, are they Pat?" (Chuckles)
(Dave Gibbons) 'There was a tabloid backlash to that,
'that this did have a political element to it'
and that it was, "Is this what our children are reading?"
But of course, if you're launching a new publication,
to get slagged off by the tabloids is a wonderful thing.
Very quickly, the age range for "2000AD" started to rise,
older people started to read it.
There always was that kind of kitchen sink/ Alan Bennett level to British comics,
and there was also the anarchic element coming from the "Bash Street Kids"
and those kind of strips, where it was children against authority.
So I think what "2000AD" just did was to take those ideas
and then put them into adventure strips,
in a way that hadn't really been done like that before.
It was quite a wild time, because we knew we had a hit on our hands,
but we also knew that the old regime
were going to do their damnedest to destroy it.
(Gun shot, glass breaking)
I do believe that punk was a sort of motivating factor with "2000AD".
It had that sort of violent, satirical edge.
Punk existed in "2000AD",
'and it's not exactly that it led me to the music,'
but a certain kind of wanting to smash things up.
Pat had a character called Judge Dredd, who was an occult detective
and we didn't feel the story was working.
So I said to Pat, "Well, it's a great title for the story... a judge."
Carlos came up with this absolutely astonishing character
'and this incredible city'
and I was just like, "My God, where has this come from?"
(Carlos Ezquerra) 'The helmet, it was based more on
'the kind of hood of a medieval executioner.
'The eagle is also a symbol from the Americans, the US.
'The eagle also has been a symbol for the fascist states,
'the Roman empire, the Germans.'
To our dismay, John hated it.
He said, "The guy looks like a fucking Spanish pirate, I'm not writing him."
I made the first story.
I established the clothes,
I established the bike, I established the city.
They never published that story,
because it was considered, at that stage, too violent.
Carlos also backed away from "Dredd"
because he got a better offer to work on a character for "Battle",
and so we're left with this character
that has kind of emerged from these two very talented individuals
and they've both walked away from their creation.
Whatever they say, that's what happened.
'And to our astonishment, Mike McMahon came out of the woodwork
'and was actually drawing in this kind of punk equivalent of Carlos'
and I thought, "Wow."
Instead of asking me for another one,
or maybe they didn't have time, I don't know,
but they published the first one from Mike McMahon
'and they even asked him to follow me very, very closely.'
So I felt angry, I really felt cheated.
John came back, realising the character was going to survive without him,
and eventually came up with this incredible story
about a robot rebellion,
which was full of a dark comedy that had never really appeared before.
(Kevin O'Neill) 'That was a tipping point for two reasons.
'One, it established "Dredd" as the number one strip,'
and it was that period onwards where you could see,
"OK, they get it now and we can more or less do anything we want.
"They'll follow us."
In 1977, you're talking about
the heart of punk rock music, certainly here in Britain.
I mean, that's when things were really kicking off,
and here they come with a guy that's basically like,
"Fuck all that punk rock, left-wing shit. I'm really punk."
'They created a character that would have killed everybody in real life
'that was involved in punk rock music.'
To come out with something like that took a lot of balls,
and, to me, that's what punk is.
The magic of "Dredd" is it was one of the very few places
where you were absolutely allowed to have your cake and eat it.
It could be the thing that was being commented on
while also being the commentary.
Judge Dredd was based on Margaret Thatcher.
'Dredd is a fascist,
'and the more fascistic we made him, the more right-wing we made him,
'the more the readers loved the character.
'We were driving it further and further towards the edge.'
The good thing about Dredd is that he does have a strong moral code,
albeit not one that we would necessarily agree with.
Yeah, OK, he might kind of work for a semi-fascist state or whatever,
but he's actually a good guy.
And he's a massive, massive mass murderer!
If you add up all the people Dredd's killed...
'Just look at the Apocalypse War at the end.
'It's one of the best Dredd moments.
'The Sov-judge says something like "You can't do it Dredd! My people!"'
'and Dredd just pushes the button and says, "Request denied."'
You just go, "That's amazing!"
Dredd said very little,
but what he said felt to the point and accurate,
'and you kind of trusted him,'
you felt in a safe pair of hands.
When I was writing a "Dredd" story, I'd write down every factor.
The two main ones were 'Dredd as Hero',
but the absolute main one was 'Dredd as Villain'.
Within the context of the action of reading a "Dredd" strip,
you have to read it literally.
You have to kind of be willing to say, "Yes, I'm on the side of the judges,"
even as you watch them summarily executing somebody
for having sugar in their house or whatever.
I'm continually surprised by people who I meet and who write to me
and say, "Oh, yeah man, 'Judge Dredd' was so influential on me growing up."
That's shortly after they get out of prison.
(Laughs)
There are people out there who see "Dredd"
as an actual aspirational vision of how our world ought to be policed.
I'm a bit alarmed about that.
(John Wagner) 'That's largely where the whole democratic storyline sprang from.
'No reader could think, "Yeah, go get 'em Dredd."'
When Dredd is saying to the husband of the dead terrorist,
"'Let this be a lesson to you, citizen: democracy is not for the people,"'
you think, "Only John Wagner could write that
"and only Judge Dredd could say it."
Over the years, the consistency of good writing and great artwork in "Judge Dredd"
'makes it just one of the major comic book creations of all time.'
I wrote a fucking song about Judge Dredd.
(r ANTHRAX: "I Am the Law")
I didn't ever write a song about Batman or Spider-Man. (Laughs)
All my craziness, I was actually getting from "2000AD".
I mean, I would hear people talking about "Enter the Dragon"
outside the arcade on holiday,
and "They've got it on Betamax," and stuff,
but never see it.
But this was happening every week.
One of the big appeals for me for "2000AD", as a child,
was the fact that it was insanely violent.
We don't call it violence in comics, we call it action.
There is still a lot of violence in "2000AD" and there always has been.
It's always been pushing the limits of what it could get away with,
so that started from Prog 1, and it's been like that ever since.
The really early stuff that Pat put together,
things like "Flesh" and so on,
were just full of the most horrific ways a person can die:
being tossed into fleshdozers
'and eaten by dinosaurs and giant scorpions,
'and all this kind of stuff.'
It was just insanely violent and that's great,
because when you're eight years old in 1977,
you can't get that anywhere else.
"Action" had given comics such a bad name
that they were looking really, really closely at everything we were doing.
Things had to pass through all these kind of censors
and our excuse that, "Hey it's only robots that are getting their legs blown off,"
'we didn't always get away with it.'
We had someone pickled in a large jar of vinegar
'and the managing director decided that that was going to encourage children'
to put their brothers and sisters into giant jars of vinegar and pickle them.
I don't know if you remember the Nemesis story where he stabs his wife?
'When that appeared in the original comic, you saw his sword going in
'and it wasn't coming out the back!'
I did the sword coming out the back with the blood going 'Pffff"!
Hey, do you want to show these kinds of things,
or do you want to just have everything like, Enid Blyton or Walt Disney?
I love horror, I love violence in movies and comics.
I love watching "Jackass" and seeing people getting kicked in the balls.
Why? It's funny, I don't know.
There is something marvellous about it.
I think, if you do it well and make it fun to look at,
and not just a load of people kind of with their fists up, grimacing...
Because that is always boring, isn't it?
I think it becomes a problem when you're revelling in it for the sake of it,
and you can usually tell when that happens.
The next really big issue where violence came to the fore
was when we started getting fully painted, very realistic artwork.
'That's when you get things like "Sléine: The Horned God".
'The late '80s and into the early '90s.'
Once you had people who could get red paint and a toothbrush
and just go flicketty flick, flick,
and then you've just got exit wounds all over the page,
'then it becomes a lot more of a challenge
'for editorial to decide how far you can go.'
If anything, I felt like it wasn't violent enough in the '90s!
(Laughs)
Kevin found, when he was doing "Nemesis",
that they would often see strange things in his artwork,
which, strange as it is, actually weren't there.
It was a cover with two terminator statues with a bridge between them,
'and I think Nemesis and Torque were fighting in the middle'
and I looked at it and said, "Well...what?
You know... (Laughs)
And he said, "Well, Gil thinks the bridge looks like a cock."
And I said, "But it starts there.
"Is this some weird medical condition or something?"
I mean... "Well, you're going to have to... It's too thick."
(Laughs)
So I got my white paint and I was thinning it down, thinking,
"I've hit a new low, this is pathetic. I shouldn't at my age be doing this."
He was very aware that some of the censors, one of them in particular,
was actually writing for porn magazines.
I don't want someone who is into pornography telling me I'm going too far, you know?
That's unacceptable, I think. (Chuckles)
I remember there was one strip that Simon Bisley drew.
What we didn't realise, the first time it was published,
is that written in graffiti, because Simon loves a bit of cheeky graffiti,
he had written the name of a popular British entertainer,
who I won't name for legal reasons, and underneath, "Bum bandit".
Just for a laugh.
And eventually we saw it and went...
"This could shut us down, this person could sue and shut the lot down forever."
So we got hold of all the copies of the films, and a scalpel
and scratched it out of the film
so it could never be reprinted by mistake.
(Kevin O'Neill) 'One thing we talked about a lot in the office was the editor's page,'
which we all absolutely fucking hated.
Tharg the Mighty is the alien editor of "2000AD".
(Pat Mills) 'Tharg was one of those ideas,'
which I think sounded like a good idea at the time,
which I have since regretted.
He's the host of the comic
and that was commonplace for boys comics, particularly in the '70s, to have.
After I think about three or four years,
I increasingly realised how Tharg was, in my view, a bit of an anachronism.
One of the things I really wanted to do was to get rid of Tharg.
Readers were quite angry.
'It was part of the package, it was part of "2000AD".
'He's an intrinsic part of why "2000AD" is what it is,'
and the moment you change anything like that, they freak out.
They just go bonkers ballistic bat shit crazy.
(imitates angry, frustrated reader)
The multiple levels of reading are what made "2000AD" work.
I'm quite sure, if you were eight or ten,
you'd just like things blowing up and guns, etc, and action
and you wouldn't necessarily pick up on all of the other levels of meaning.
It was very sneaky.
You know, people tend to think of comics as being throwaway entertainment,
but this was some deep political stuff.
It's got subtext in a way that nothing had before.
Just like most other kids, I read Dickens,
and he is talking about the social evils of his day,
so why shouldn't we talk about the social evils of our day?
There is the old Roman maxim
about bread and circuses keeping the population subdued
'by making sure they're fed and making sure they're entertained.
'But the reason that works
'is that people always prefer to be entertained rather than engaged.'
So one way of making sure that they have some sort of understanding
is to actually encapsulate some of this stuff into the entertainment.
Alan Grant and John Wagner were very influenced
by what was going on in the present day.
Before they used to write in the morning, they'd sit down and read the news.
We always tried to write stories
so that the young could appreciate them and older people could appreciate them,
and the kind of satirical edge that goes in most "2000AD" stories
is largely what attracts the older audience.
John and I went out of our way to make Johnny Alpha a repressed character
because he was a mutant,
'and the normal people of the time, whipped up by politicians, hated mutants.
'So he was very much a second-class citizen in the world that he lived in,'
and bounty hunting was the onlyjob that was open to him and to other mutants.
It was quite a neat way of doing it
without getting too involved in race or, you know, actual issues
that the management might have thought, "We don't want to touch this."
You just bring in mutants as the disadvantaged minority
'and it works the same way.'
So yeah, we tried to make a big deal out of that
and it was a very popular story in the comic "2000AD".
I hadn't realised, actually,
that it had been released in South Africa, uncensored.
Johnny Alpha being a mutant and the resonances of that with Apartheid,
which I grew up under in the late '80s and early '90s
was absolutely just devastating to see,
'and to see that kind of allegorical comparison.
'It was a deeply racist, deeply repressive regime.
'There was hectic censorship.
'It was interesting how people managed to slip around that.'
To be able to explore it in inventive storytelling, that was really exciting.
It does seem to be very important to a lot of people.
To me, it's just a job and a pleasurable job at that,
but when you hear what effect it has had on people,
it makes you think.
People were engaging with politics, with social circumstance,
with poverty, with segregation,
but in a really fun way
and it didn't feel like watching the news. It got around that whole issue fatigue.
And the other place that you had that same demand for intelligence
and that same weird and wonderful sense of humour
was with "Nemesis the Warlock".
Nemesis is a catharsis for a Catholic childhood.
The aliens are the good guys and all humans, the whole human race,
are the evil bastards.
The human empire is run by Torquemada and his terminators
'and they are the most extreme combination'
of racists and the Catholic Church.
(Kevin O'Neill) 'Pat's stroke of brilliance
'was having the real-life Torquemada as a basis for our Torquemada.'
And Pat's "Be pure, be vigilant, behave" which ended up on the Berlin Wall -
somebody had written it on the Berlin Wall years later, which delighted us.
"Nemesis the Warlock" is clearly about xenophobia of different kinds.
Xenophobia and racism.
And it's all kind of very broad brushstrokes,
but I think it is great that that kind of stuff is dealt with on some level.
You know, even if it's as simple as "Hating people is bad,"
that's actually quite a good message to get across.
The good thing about the story is
we side with him against the humans,
because the humans are all fascists.
I think Pat did some amazing stuff with that.
They had one bit where they had Torquemada giving this amazing speech
where he was talking about the human race, saying, "We're all white men now!"
This is at the height of the National Front, and things like this, you know,
and it was also the height of Apartheid.
With Kevin, he was drawing such astonishing things,
that there was really no need to direct him in any way.
(Kevin O'Neill) 'I like movies that are big and I like science fiction films
'and the Ray Harryhausen stuff, like people being dwarfed by statues.
'And you can see it in "Nemesis" where I could finally let rip,
'I could finally do what I wanted to do.'
The horns, the cloven hooves, everything, is a medieval devil figure
'and you know, when you think of it in the future,'
if he's the enemy of the human race, he is somehow the Devil.
But the readers loved it, they loved it
and we couldn't go too far, it seemed, we just couldn't go too far.
What becomes plain in the later books is that he's taken his war too far
'and in the end, the difference between Nemesis and Torquemada
'is shown as being next to nothing.'
They both end up just trapped endlessly in this cycle of hate,
one no better than the other, which I thought was a fantastic ending.
But again, it doesn't actually give you
a comfortable moral conclusion that good prevailed.
It doesn't even tell you what good was.
You've got to explore real themes of good and evil.
That's a particular obsession of mine.
I think because, having grown up in the '50s and '60s,
where a lot of people were presented as Mother Theresas,
and by my personal experience, they were anything but.
'Nuns, priests, monks, you name it,
'and they were all, for the most part, frauds.'
Not one bad apple in a barrel, they were all rotten. Rotten to the core.
There are times in your career
when you get a bit of a platform to be able to say what you want
about something that really moves you, or really angers you,
and I think that, if you decide not to do it at that point,
what the hell are you doing this thing for?
It was talking to kids and presenting the images in such an appealing way,
that it was actually getting through
and turning us all into a generation of anarchists.
It was kind of like the slightly bad kid in class going,
(Whispers) "Take a look at this!
"Never mind your homework, take a look at this!"
To encourage young people to question authority is no bad thing.
You should always ask questions and why,
and just don't accept things as they are, don't accept the status quo.
I think it's good for kids
to have those blinkers torn off at an early age, frankly,
and grow up prepared for how messed up the world really is.
(Geoff Barrow) 'Sometimes those lines between a good guy and a bad guy
'are really blurred.'
Very early on, it pushed those questions into my brain.
It's definitely still there, you can see it in the stories.
'Rob Williams' "Dredd" story from a year or so ago,
'the one with the gay club.'
That caused so much hoo-ha,
and you just think, "Well, what is the problem with that?"
But it was great because it was just like
it's sticking a stick in a wasps' nest and stirring it up.
Maybe parents might disagree, but I think you should be giving kids
the opportunity to understand that there are alternative viewpoints,
and maybe the stuff on TV and in the newspapers
might be mediated a lot more than you imagine as a younger child.
And to see that kind of material being confronted and being dramatised
was always very exciting.
(Alan Grant) 'There was a feeling in the air'
that "2000AD" was something radically different
from anything that had been done before, either in America or in Britain,
'You were living for the moment.'
(Pete Milligan) 'People were having a good time.'
It seemed to kind of represent a certain kind of demi-monde, you know?
It was that sense of kind of brotherhood
that I think was very, very important,
'and, I think, was a huge factor in the success of it.'
You've no idea how much we all loved working on "2000AD".
We ate, slept, drank it. We just talked about it all day long.
'We stayed after work, we went to the pub, we talked about "2000AD".
'That's all we did.'
But because "2000AD" was a weekly comic, it had weekly deadlines
and at that time there was no Federal Express.
And the artists all used to bring their work into the office on a Friday,
and at lunchtime, we retired to the pub
where we stayed until the pub closed at eleven o'clock at night and threw us out.
If you were in that group, then you felt like you were in a circled wagon,
that could cope with anything.
It was a mad time and everything.
At the comic conventions we'd stay out drinking until half seven in the morning,
and then get up in two hours and go and do sketches for people.
It was crazy.
You needed certain camaraderie to produce your best work.
I think that was actually really important.
What was great in those days was turning up with your...
'I remember turning up with my artwork, whatever it might have been,
and there was a pile of Mick McMahon's "Judge Dredds"
and we were all thinking, "That's great."
Everything was hot.
And everyone was looking at each other's work and ramping it up.
I'd go in the office and I would see what Dave Gibbons and Mike McMahon
and Brian Bolland were doing, and think, "OK, got to up the game."
It was friendly and competitive at the same time.
My memories of working in the studio with Mick
were basically arguing over whose turn it was to make the coffee
and listening to Derek and Clive all day.
But amazingly, when I look back on what we did,
that was where "Rogue Trooper" was created,
'in the little shed we called the studio.
'It was where Mick drew "Block Mania",
'which was one of the most celebrated "Judge Dredd" strips -
'it's where he did some early work on "Sléine",
'which was another wonderful strip that he did with Pat Mills.'
And we had this kind of rivalry where I'd sit there drawing
and Mick would come and look over my shoulder, and belch, and sniff
and I'd go, "Well that's a pretty good drawing,"
and he'd go... (Sniffs) "Is it?"
'Mick always used to say to me,
"'Dave, what you're drawing there, it's only going to take you an afternoon,
"'but it's going to be in print forever. It's going to be there to haunt you."'
And he was under a deadline
and he had to draw this picture of Judge Caligula
lifting a goldfish bowl above his head,
and I told him it was crap,
and when it came out, I told him it was crap again,
and he realised it was crap,
so whenever he would give me... (Sniffs) "What's that then?"
I'd go "Judge Caligula and a goldfish bowl."
I think it was one of those rare cases where you could transfer the joy and enthusiasm
actually in the office and in the freelancers,
in everybody working to do the best they possibly could...
We transferred it directly to the readers.
It was important that we did a good job,
but it was something that we were having fun with.
'It just felt like being on a really, really good team of friends.'
(Dave Bishop) "2000AD" has always been...
...a bit of a boys own club.
These were comics for boys, made by boys really,
and we didn't know how to write about women.
Most of the stories were about men
and there really weren't often even female side-kicks.
And I didn't really notice that so much growing up as a kid,
but it was those stories which did feature female characters
'which I was most drawn to.'
For some reason a lot of women didn't seem to work on boys comics
and I don't know why, because J.K. Rowling has written the adventures
of one of the most popular boy characters in the world,
and if she wrote a story for "2000AD", it would be huge, I guess.
But it didn't attract women writers and artists
in the way that maybe now, it's broken down a lot, you know.
Comics has been a boys club for a lot of years
and even now, it's still something that's kind of...
There is still work to be done.
I think some of that comes from the corporates at the top,
the big bosses and what they think people want to read about.
'We still see so many heroines, specifically in superhero comics,
'just with giant tits and not much personality,
'and they're actually interchangeable.'
Change her costume and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
I've found often that if you try to represent,
what tends to happen is that people point fingers at you and say,
"How dare you write from the experience of something you'll never understand?"
I get it all the time,
but I still keep trying to put diversity into the comics.
But really, honestly, it's been nothing but a flail.
People just get mad at you for doing it
and then they get mad at you for not doing it.
I often worry when there is a very deliberate policy
to try and do something, like either include or exclude women, as an example.
Why not just write stories?
The first point we realised I'd be the first female writer of "Dredd"...
'It certainly wasn't when we came up with the idea,
'but when it was commissioned, or just after we pitched it,'
I thought, "Hang on..."
It's become almost this vicious circle.
There aren't comics for girls or women so they haven't tended to read it,
so therefore it hadn't occurred to them to create for that.
For me, I never thought I'd write "Dredd".
To be completely honest, it never occurred to me.
And equally if you look at something and you see nothing that reflects you,
if you're not in it, then you think, "Well, I don't exist" or "I don't belong in this world."
When I did the Glasgow Comic-Con a couple of years ago,
I was on a panel, and afterwards all these women came up to speak to me,
all these girls came up to speak to me
and I thought, "You've just not seen a female creator on a panel.
"Maybe you just needed to see someone to think, 'Maybe I can do this."'
And it does help to know someone else is doing that.
Being able to see them and being visible.
I would love to see more women working for it,
because there are tons of creators out there
who would absolutely give their eye to work on it.
So I think, you know, if Tharg were to employ a few more,
then I'm sure that would go down very well.
(Lauren Beukes) "'Halo Jones" was very much a story about a girl,'
and an ordinary girl in a slum future world.
'It was really just about her life and it expanded from there,
'and that was really amazing to see how it expanded.
'She ends up in a horrific war zone
'and what that does to her is just horrible,
but it was all from a very feminine perspective
and that was fascinating to see.
If you create something that is iconic enough,
nobody else can finish it.
'And I just remember feeling honoured one day, chatting to Alan,
'and I said, "What would have happened?"'
And he took a couple of hours
and told me and Dave McKean the story of the rest of "Halo Jones",
'all the way to the end, when she is an old woman,
'and keeps going out and keeps going further and further out
'and walking away from things and what happened.
'And there were tears in my eyes at the end of "Halo Jones"'
and I was imagining this beautiful Halo Jones,
and just thinking what a huge tragedy it was that it didn't get finished,
because Alan chose to walk away from working conditions
that were essentially archaic.
He has said that he had it all planned out and he could do...
I think he had another six books planned, quite an astonishing amount planned,
'and I think she was going to end up...
'The last book... It was going to be her whole life.
'I'm possibly the most gutted that it's not going to see the light
'and if I could actually persuade him to write it just for me,'
then I really would, but I don't think he's got time.
Had Alan finished "Halo Jones",
I think that completed "Halo Jones"
would have actually been one of the first great comics.
It would have been up there with "Watchmen",
it would have been up there with "V for Vendetta".
You know, things that we talk about when we talk about comics -
"Halo Jones" should have been one of them.
They had that whole thing worked out.
That would have been a major work for Alan Moore and for "2000AD",
and the fact that it's only a truncated version is a bit sad.
But I wish he'd finished telling that story,
because when he told it to me
just in a this-happens- and-that-happens kind of voice,
it still made me cry.
Comics have got a terrible history for treating people really, really badly.
We had endless chiefs and very few Indians.
There were all these managing editors and super-managing editors and so on.
And they were all doing fuck all, basically.
They didn't really treat the artists very well at all.
We just turned up with the artwork, we weren't going to get it back.
They paid... Somebody paid us...
And then they decided that the vaults were just so full of artwork
that they were using some of it to soak up floods and stuff up drafts.
They would be using absolutely beautiful full colour artwork,
drawn on and painted on really thick illustration board
as a cutting mat.
I've seen artwork like that put down in a doorway
for people's muddy feet to dry out on.
It's unbelievable how badly and poorly valued original artwork was.
I've discovered that over 100 of my pages have been stolen.
The people that were treating them badly
were not fit to clean their shoes, you know?
There were people employed to relentlessly go through artwork
and white out any signatures, or any in-jokes,
or people's names on shop fronts or on the sides of vans.
And one of the people who was employed to do that was Kevin O'Neill,
who had worked a lot as what we used to call an "art bodger".
A bodger was not... I was never happy with that job.
Even though I was very young,
I didn't like taking people's signatures off strips. I thought that was wrong.
There was this absurd idea that by keeping the comics anonymous,
the competition, for one thing, wouldn't know who was doing it,
so they wouldn't try and headhunt or track down the artist.
But also there was even the idea that readers might get confused
that this wasn't real and was being made by people,
which is another bizarre idea I think.
The credit story is the single most important story...
...in the history of "2000AD",
and in the history of comics generally.
Basically what the credit cards were,
'were a way of crediting the writers and the artists and the letterers.
'This had never been done in British comics.'
(Kevin O'Neill) 'I said, "What about calling it a credit card?'
"I'll just stick them on and we'll see what happens."
It was perhaps his disgust
at all those years of denying people credit that spurred him on
to make sure that people did get credit.
We gave the artists the writers' phone numbers
and the other artists' phone numbers.
It all kind of hooked up. That hadn't happened before.
It seems astonishing, given how long comics have been around,
that that was so rare.
But they didn't like it. It was bad news.
It probably was bad news because we'd all compare rates.
(Laughs)
The publishers were against giving credit,
because they probably realised the way things could go
'if you could put a name to an art star
'and thereby make the artist into a commodity.'
(Kevin O'Neill) 'Once people could write in
'and say, "I really like Dave Gibbon's artwork,“
David Gibbons becomes much more valuable
and they don't want that, they didn't want that.
So it started as stealth and ended up just as blunt trauma. (Laughs)
And now it meant that the individual creators had,
if you like, in contemporary terms, a brand of their own
and people like letterers, who were just the invisible men of comics,
now got a credit.
They also knew who were the crap writers and crap artists,
and so you'll see, after the by-lines are introduced,
that, what should we say, some of the more iffy writers,
they don't appear no more.
Then there's a turning point around '86, '87, where a bunch of things happened
and the ripples from that continue to this day.
If you want to create for "2000AD", you have to surrender all rights.
And that had been a niggle and it turned into a real problem for the comic
and people said, "I'm not going to create anything new,
"I'm not going to work for it anymore."
You know, "Fuck you," basically.
Yachting Monthly, Newsagent Monthly, anything at all...
The writers and artists always kept their copyright.
Photographers kept their copyright on their work.
And comics was the only division where you didn't keep your copyright,
and it's still exactly the same.
The reason why publishers buy all rights
is because then they can do what they like with it
and they own it in every conceivable way.
The rest of the world looks at us like we're quite pathetic.
Somebody in the distant past didn't properly get the rights
for a lot of stuff in "2000AD" and I don't know who.
This was in the '80s and the contracts weren't great.
In fact, they didn't have contracts.
When you received the cheque, there was a box on the back of the cheque
which said "I understand by cashing this cheque,
"I give up all rights to copyright in this character or in this story."
If you didn't fill in the box that said you were giving away your copyright,
you didn't get paid.
Hang on, you mean I don't own any of this at all?
And people would go, "Surely you knew that when you got the thing?
"There is a notice on the back of the cheque
"saying, 'By the way, we own all this' and, you know, 'Fuck off."'
It didn't actually say
"We own all this and fuck off," that's me paraphrasing the legal.
But the legal was "We own all this and fuck off."
If you don't own your own material, you're just treated like dirt
and they can take your beloved characters off you
because they're not your characters now, they say they're their characters
and they can give them to anybody.
Somebody was reprinting "2000AD" stories for the American market
'and I noticed some of my stories got reprinted.'
I discovered that actually you didn't get paid if your stories were reprinted.
That was the point where I thought, "You know...
think I'll stop working for "2000AD"."
A lot of creators don't create new strips for "2000AD" now.
People have worked for it in the past.
Getting the likes of John Wagner
to write a new strip and surrender the copyright,
why would they do that?
I know I've held stuff back thinking, "I don't want to give this awayjust yet.
"Could I write a novel out of it, could I pitch it to Image or Vertigo?"
So I think people have held stuff back
and probably are sitting on a lot of decent material.
There's an alternate world in which they send me a quid for the "Future Shocks"
and a copy of the magazine it was in, and I went on and created some kind of...
"Neverwhere" would have been a "2000AD" strip or whatever.
The story of how so many of us got to work for the Americans
is almost unbelievable to me now.
In, I think, 1981 or so,
'a couple of DC's head guys, Dick Giordano and Joe Orlando,'
came to Britain, set up court in a hotel in London
and invited British artists to come and see them,
not to present their samples and maybe get some work,
but actually just to be offered work.
They, I think, rented a hotel room and invited a lot of guys over,
looked at their art, drank a lot of beer, had a great time.
All the artists and writers afterwards said,
"We had such a great time when Joe and Dick were over,"
and they came back and they brought back "2000AD".
The social commentary, the political commentary,
the class commentary, all those things...
You didn't get those anywhere else, that wasn't being done anywhere else,
not on TV, not in film, no other kind of comics.
Very soon these artists were being headhunted,
another word for stolen I suppose.
Obviously America could offer fantastic rates,
the chance to work on characters that, for many, were their dreams.
Dreams come true for these artists. They were fans as well as pros.
The first two to go were Brian Bolland and Dave Gibbons.
Oh, it was terrific,
because, as a little boy, I was a DC comics fan,
and to suddenly find
'that I was drawing the cover of "Green Lantern",
'even though I was 27 or something at the time,
'It was a thrill.'
The first time I went to the States, I was in awe of it.
What I loved were not the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State...
It was the fire plugs in the street, the big clunky fire hydrants
with big nuts and bolts on them, and chains,
'and the water towers on top of the downtown buildings
'that Steve Ditko used to draw in "Spider-Man".'
So, to a British creator, there was always this otherworldliness about the States.
And by the time they got to Alan Moore, they realised they'd hit paydirt.
One of the great treats was meeting Dave once a month
and he would have even more new pages from "Watchmen".
'And he was so excited by this new thing he was doing,
'and we could all tell that it was going to be so good,
'an extension of "2000AD" really.'
(Dave Gibbons) 'What Alan and I were able to really let loose on'
was the outsider's view of superheroes and costumed heroes.
Much though we loved them, we were a step back.
We could question them a bit, we didn't take them as gospel,
we could see the wood for the trees.
(Kevin O'Neill) 'And "Dark Knight" was roughly the same time as well,'
and suddenly, everything changed because they hit big, those books,
they hit mainstream big.
The intellectual level and the level of narrative ambition
ramps up in comics dramatically at that point,
and everybody wants to be doing that.
So "2000AD" figured that they wanted to get involved in this
and try to come up with a superhero,
which is something they had never done before,
so it had to be specifically "2000AD".
And, fortunately for me, I happened to be
the apprentice who'd reached the end of his apprenticeship,
and they came to me and obviously I loved that stuff,
so I'd been working on my own superhero story
'called "Zenith", since like 1982.'
(Will Brooker) 'You had a future western,'
you had a future cop story, you had a future...
...war story,
but "Zenith" was about 1998 and it was about Britain
and superhero comics I'd read had never been about contemporary Britain before.
I would say "Zenith" was the most exciting thing I had seen fictionally
since "Star Wars" ten years before.
I think he was one of the first, really, of the new type of superheroes.
You see them everywhere now,
the media brat-type superhero who is constantly on TV,
but nobody had done that before.
Superheroes were guys who came and saved your cat,
and at best they would save the galaxy,
but Zenith just wanted to shag page-three girls and drink
and just happened to have super powers.
I figured honestly, if I had superpowers, would I go out and fight? No.
'And as Zenith says in the strip,
"'You don't ask Daley Thompson..." who was the major Olympian at the time,'
"...just because he's tough and strong and fast, to go out and fight crime,
"so why the hell are you asking me?"
The vogue at the time was for the what has been referred to
as the 'dark superhero' so "Watchmen", "Dark Knight"...
Zenith, in a lot of ways, is the antithesis of the dark superhero.
(Will Brooker) 'It was a very bold, confident debut by Morrison and Yeowell.
'It's like they knew this had to be brilliant, and it was brilliant.
'It was just so full of energy and cleverness and style.'
So much of the American work that is revered
is actually unreadable pap, you know?
So yeah, I think it was kind of cool when our boys went over there
and shook everything up a little bit.
(Alex Garland) 'The American comic scene felt comfortable.'
It felt staid and comfortable and dull.
And what "2000AD" did was just kick it in the face.
Everything the Americans didn't dare touch,
because it was almost sacrosanct,
we touched and molested and dressed in a dress
and molested again.
I think Karen Berger was a very significant figure
in that she recognised what we could do and gave us a way of channelling that.
I went back to England for about three or four years every six months.
'I'd reached out to Alan Moore
'and I said, "Alan, who do you see out there that's really talented?"'
And he goes, "Oh, you really should meet this guy Grant Morrison.
"He's really got something, he's only done a few things..."
But you know, they'll both probably hate me for saying this!
They had a kind of day where they just gathered everyone,
and people like me and Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
all went in on the same day to pitch ideas.
And I'd come up with the "Batman" thing, "Arkham Asylum",
'and on the train down
'I'd also thought something to do with this old Animal Man character
'that I'd liked as a kid.'
So I pitched these two projects and just sold them straight away,
even though Karen claims she couldn't understand my accent.
That's how you do it.
Go in and go... (Mumbles) and you'll get a job at DC.
So it turned out, where I went to England for us
to be as an ambassador of DC and a talent scout,
I ended up editing so many new projects
'with UK writers and artists.'
There was a really great response
from comics readers and comics retailers.
At the time it was known as the 'Karen Berger books'
or the 'Karen Berger line',
which I thought was actually completely accurate.
My vision for Vertigo was, "Let's make a home
"'where creators can create their own material
"'and have a stake in it,
and just take comics to different levels."'
There wouldn't have been a Vertigo if there wasn't a "2000AD".
The subversiveness, the anarchy, the rebellion against authority,
'all came through to Vertigo.'
I would read Vertigo comics as the closest in American comics
as you would get to "2000AD".
Or, certainly, a lot of "2000AD" creators
that have gone on to work in the American market,
often Vertigo is their first port of call.
I think a fundamental thing, looking back now,
we can see that what the British Invasion brought
was a sense of authorship, or auteurism, to American comics.
They were talking about stuff that you really wanted to talk about.
You didn't self-edit a bit,
or you didn't have to couch it in metaphor as you might have to do in "2000AD",
you know, you could let loose a bit more.
There were two DC comics I then read obsessively.
'One was "Swamp Thing" and the other was "Watchmen".'
But it was Alan Moore that pulled me there
and that's why I read them, and frankly that's why they were good.
Alan was the first writer that people started following... following the writer.
In comics, people mostly were really, I guess back in the '70s,
or '60s, '70s,
were following artists.
If one makes an argument
that Vertigo at least has a lot of the genes of "2000AD" in it,
one could say that "2000AD" therefore has had this huge effect,
or its children have had a huge effect,
on comic books worldwide.
Some of these writers went on to write...
They might have started off
writing at Vertigo,
'but they became some of the top superhero writers
'and that ended up influencing superhero comics.
'DC characters and Marvel characters started getting darker
'and more psychological, more introspective.'
They were so shocked that this could do this.
It was like they hadn't imagined these characters being capable
'of the moves we were putting them through.
'And there was a love for it,'
for all the anarchic stuff and the rebellious stuff.
We'd all grown up with Superman as a friend.
Deep down there was a love for them
that I think the Americans themselves had lost.
In a lot of cases, they were just going through the motions
to earn paycheques or to produce material,
and we just set it alight again.
(Alan Grant) 'We did a series of Judge Dredd/Batman team-ups
'which were very, very successful.
'And the difference between the two came out in that,
'because there was no room in Dredd's world view
to accept the concept of justice
and there was no room in Batman's world view
'to accept the concept of "obey the law or else," you know?'
(Will Brooker) "Batman" is built on a premise which is inherently problematic:'
a white billionaire deciding to spend his money on military equipment
to carry out a war on crime which is because his parents died,
which doesn't really stop crime at all,
because he doesn't want to stop crime, he wants to keep fighting crime.
Whereas at least in "Judge Dredd", that premise is questioned,
so there is a kind of...
The problem in "Judge Dredd" is never far from the surface,
whereas in "Batman", I think it is held away.
Americans trust heroes.
The English would not be able to give Superman
that sort of glorious crown that Americans give him
of "Yes, you can go off in your lovely suit
"and your wonderful flappy cape
"and you can fight for truth, justice and the American way
"and you can represent us."
Then you discover that they spent 50 years molesting small children
and you just go, "Uh, I don't want any part of this hero thing."
So I think it's that, in some ways,
that's the giant engine that drives "2000AD",
because one of the wonderful messages of "2000AD" is "Do not trust your heroes."
There is a prestige thing in a career,
and you do want to work for Marvel and DC, because...
it just seems that people take you more seriously if you are.
It feels like the top of the industry.
Whether that's right or wrong, you could argue.
When Dave Gibbons and Brian Bolland first left for the States,
I said to John Sanders, the publisher, "You're going to lose them.
"These are two of the greatest artists we have on "2000AD"."
And he said, "Well, what can we do? We lose them to America."
No! You've got to fight back! You've got to say, "Hey!"
You know, why do we have to play poor relation to America?
I really object to that.
Well, once you've lost Brian Bolland, you've lost Brian Bolland.
That's it, he's really never going to come back.
And I think the staff could see the writing on the wall.
You know... "Oh God, this is really, really bad news for '2000AD',"
because then it becomes a shop window.
If you got a chance to shine in "2000AD", you would get noticed by America.
So it created this kind of Simon Cowell-ish ascent tube
through which we could reach America,
and it was a bit of a shame for "2000AD" to be treated that way.
I remember being quite rattled
because I still had a very paternal attitude towards "2000AD",
and I thought, "God, this could really destroy us."
It became a sort of career path
and I'm definitely guilty of falling into that mindset.
I definitely felt, "Yes, I've taken that next step in my career,
"from '2000AD' to America."
You know, "Tomorrow: the world."
Basically, we were nursery slopes for Vertigo,
and so, if I found a new artist, I'd think,
"Right, how long have I got him before he gets pinched by DC?"
And that was life from '87 onwards. "2000AD" became your apprenticeship.
Even with contracts and royalties in place,
people still wanted to go and work for America,
go to San Diego Comic-Con, go to New York Comic-Con.
It was all much more glamorous than dowdy old "2000AD", still stumbling along.
Pat recoiled from the Americans.
He seemed to have a thing about not wanting to go to America.
It was important to him to stay working for Britain.
"2000AD"! You've arrived! You don't have to go anywhere from there!
If you want to, that's fine,
but to use it as a stepping stone, I think is quite questionable.
In other words, "Well, I'm just doing this story
"so I've got something to show someone else."
I don't think any publication appreciates being used in that way.
But the truth is, ultimately the American stuff was making more money for us,
and, to a certain extent, it was more fun
to be able to grab "Batman" or the "Justice League of America"
and do things with them for a much wider audience.
I think... Yeah, I think it made American comics a lot better
and it made "2000AD" a lot worse.
I would describe the dark ages of "2000AD", and have done,
as "The Dave Bishop-Andy Diggle Era".
The best David Bishop story I heard was off a friend of mine, Trev Hairsine.
And Trev owed David Bishop some artwork,
and this was when they had fax machines. so you'd fax things back and forth.
So Trev was off making a cup of tea and he could hear his fax machine,
going "Chig chig chig...,"
and Trev's mum said, "Oh you've got a fax, Trev."
And she goes over to the fax machine and pulls out the sheet,
and it said, "Where are my pages, you cunt?" (Laughs)
I was an arsehole in a hurry effectively.
Such is life.
And I was a bit of a shit to several people.
Sorry.
But yes, a few people got the harsh end of the shitty stick from me
because I had a vision for what I wanted the comic to be,
and they were in my way.
The thing about Pat's work on "2000AD" was that he was a really good editor.
In the '90s that fell away.
They just didn't have that standard of editorial control.
It had an identity crisis in the 1990s where it didn't know who it appealed to,
because the old audience was drifting away,
was, I suppose, growing up.
Nobody wanted to be the editor who turns the lights out at "2000AD".
Nobody wants to be the grave digger who leaves the shovel
and walks away with a dead comic behind them in the ground.
There was a definite kind of..."pfff"...crash at that point.
"2000AD" did get close to cancellation in the '90s,
when Egmont Fleetway was running it.
They didn't get us, we didn't understand anything they wanted to do,
and every year was another salami slicing exercise
trying to do better with less,
with idiots in charge.
Obviously, it was a very worrying period.
I think everyone was convinced... I was convinced
we only had a few more months of a job left.
Sometimes when things are struggling, those decisions aren't the best decisions,
because you're actually a bit desperate,
and that kind of time reeked of the title being a little bit desperate
and not really selling what maybe its owners thought it should.
At one point, "2000AD" tried to be all things to all people,
and just diluted itself and became crass and very, very shallow
and frankly embarrassing.
The publisher thought the way to fix this
was to find a new readership and bring them in from outside,
'which seemed wrongheaded to me.
'They were trying to appeal to this laddish "Loaded"-reader kind of mentality,
'which I thought was a really terrible idea.'
(Dave Bishop) 'We only saw the ads for the first time
'when the proofs came in and they were just about to send them'
and they were two of the most offensive things I've ever seen in my life.
Me and David Bishop were arguing with the marketing manager, our boss,
basically the publisher, over these ads,
pointing out that not only was it not going to win us a new readership,
it was going to alienate the one we had.
"Please. No, don't do this. This is going to backfire.
"This is everything we are trying not to do."
And then the ads ran
and then the protests began,
and they forbid us responding and they forbid us from running
any of the letters or the emails that we were getting about it,
so we just had to sit and have pies of shit thrown in our face.
(Grant Morrison) 'The Summer Offensive came about with Mark Millar.
'We thought "Wouldn't it be great to see if we can take over the entire comic."'
And they let us get away with it.
I don't know what it was, if everybody was just on rave drugs at the time.
Even though in subsequent years, people have castigated it,
I think it was great, I loved doing that.
People like Grant and Mark Millar, they were naughty boys.
They were like, "Oh, it's all beardy weirdies and old men.
"We're going to kick against that."
We were all part of the, sort of, bratty newcomers
that came along to "2000AD" to fill the void left by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
Wagner in particular just saw me as a disgusting fop,
and made no secret of letting me know.
Because I would go about dressed in these velvet jackets and frills,
'psychedelic, 1967 Rolling Stones stuff that later became Austin Powers.'
God knows what they thought of me. I was a bit of a pain in the arse.
It got a bit too slick, and in, and hip and it forgot what was at its core.
We saw these guys as being part of an older generation
that we were deliberately annoying,
and I feel slightly ashamed about it now.
But we were young, you have to fight back somehow.
It's 32 pages a week. It's a monster.
It eats story and it eats writers and it eats artists
and finding people who can sustain and keep that going...
And, as editor, your first priority is "I must fill the pages."
Your second priority is "I must fill the pages with something worth reading."
'Let me see, we did... This is my fault, this is entirely my fault...
'We did a strip called "The Space Girls".'
Shudder, shudder... The shame, the shame...
Carry that one to my grave, that was a bad idea.
'We did "Blair One" where we turned Tony Blair into the Bionic Man,
'the Six Million Dollar Man.'
It's "2000AD" not "Private Eye", you know. That was too on the nose.
I think satire works better when it's slightly more subtextual.
There was a point where we seemed to be getting a legal letter every week,
which was quite daunting.
Every week it was like, "Oh, look!" Lovely thick parchment envelope.
Lawyers' name in the top corner
from the firm of Bastard, Bastard and Fuck You Limited,
and you'd think, "Oh God, here we go again."
'There was a "Future Shock" that ran which featured a psychotic dentist.'
Somebody somewhere thought it was a good idea to use the name
of the dentist whose clinic was around the corner from our office.
And then the dentist in question saw this, and, unsurprisingly, was not best chuffed.
'We'd run a cover and it had "Star Wars" as the big, bold headline on the cover,
'because it was about wars in space,'
and we got a cease and desist letter from LucasArts for that one.
I think at that time, that was kind of make or break time for "2000AD"
as far as Egmont was concerned.
I mean, it was predicted to die by '96,
but it kept making money for people at that point,
and I think the "Dredd" movie didn't hurt because it brought a lot of money in.
So that got it over a hump there, even though it didn't become a big hit.
All we kept hearing was occasional rumblings about a "Dredd" movie.
I don't think anyone believed it would happen,
and when it did, I thought, "I kind of wish it hadn't." (Laughs)
(Colin MacNeil) 'There was a whole bunch of folks from "2000AD".
'We all went to this big showing in London.'
Everyone came out and said,
"Oh, brilliant, fantastic, it's all on the up now!"
Coming out of the "Judge Dredd" film,
me and the other creators said, "Wow, that was really good, wasn't it?"
I think there was only a couple of us that went, "No that's shite.
"That's just shite." "No, no, no... It will help the comic."
"No it won't. It's shite."
I am the law!
I just wish somehow John Wagner could have said,
"No, you can't do this to my character.
"Sylvester Stallone as Judge Dredd is the worst idea ever."
I can remember me and my two daughters being the last people in the cinema,
waiting for our names to come up on the screen.
'And they were there, right at the very end in tiny lettering,
'which, to me, was a calculated insult,'
because I wouldn't help them in the development of the film.
But then they wouldn't pay me to do that so I thought, you know,
"Well... sod you."
(Carlos Ezquerra) 'The problem is that after ten minutes he takes off the helmet.
'It's like if in a "Superman" film,
'if he was, all through the film, dressed like Clark Kent.'
If you're a well-known actor and you're going to play Judge Dredd,
then your agent says, "'Hey, I've got to see my boy's face."
(John Wagner) 'The plot was all wrong.'
It was a dynastic power struggle, which "Dredd" has never been about.
(Scott Ian) 'It wasn't even a movie that was so bad it was good.
'It was just terrible.
'It was terrible and a disgrace
'and an insult to great writing and a great character'
and a great idea,
and an insult to any fan that has ever read a "Judge Dredd" comic.
You know, "Dredd" doesn't translate so well in terms of America.
Certainly both movies didn't really get any traction in America at all,
and I wonder whether that's because
"Dredd" represents an element of America from a British point of view.
Maybe the world is just not ready for that. (Laughs)
Trying to adapt anything for television is difficult enough
when you're trying to remain true to the story that you're developing it from,
but it becomes much more difficult
once various executives, managers, secretaries and everybody else
get their fingers in the pie.
You've got these hundreds of character universes, all this potential.
Surely some of this can be activated
and turned into films or video games or whatever.
You know, it's a gold mine and we're not making the best use of it.
Absolutely true.
So they set up a company called Fleetway Film and TV.
Fleetway Film and Television...
Jesus.
They paid this production company to put "2000AD" characters into Hollywood.
That is insane.
A deal was put out and offered to all the creators:
"Sign this deal. Sign away the..."
They wanted conformation that Egmont held all the audiovisual rights and everything,
and they went about it in quite a cask-handed fashion.
Which really got up the backs of a lot of creators,
and crucially, the unholy trinity of Wagner, Mills and Grant.
The writers and artists were kept out of the loop,
and the managers, senior editors and executives
tried to do it all on their own,
and of course they had no idea
why "2000AD" was successful in the first place.
As I remember, everything that they touched turned to dust rather than gold.
They employed people who were the wrong people to employ.
They were working for the other side. (Laughs)
A part of you thinks that's a shame,
the other part thinks it serves them bloody right.
It was a good idea done badly, mishandled a lot,
and editorial got a lot of stick for it.
Kevin and I were involved with a Hollywood producer
'who wanted to produce "Marshal Law", and...'
I wrote a screenplay for her and the character was optioned and so on,
and we actually did very well financially.
When I've had dealings with Hollywood,
I thought, "I'm a bit of a beginner," but I was way ahead of them.
And as I say, Kevin and I made thousands and thousands of pounds
from dealing with the same people,
and Egmont made one pound.
Yeah, optioning a property like "Strontium Dog" for a pound,
or a dollar I think it actually was...
Whichever, it's not great money either way.
It doesn't seem like a work of genius.
Doing it is a way to kick-start the deal,
but it does mean that the creators get nothing.
'Then you get somebody who gets paid a five-figure sum to write a script
'and the creators get no money.'
So if you're the creator of whatever strip it is,
you know, "Bohunk Adventures",
and they've optioned it for a pound
and you get 20p or 17.5p in your royalty statement,
meanwhile, somebody's being paid more than you've been paid in your entire life
to write 20 years of "Bohunk Adventures",
then yeah, I'd be fucked off too, frankly.
That thing that you do when you're like 2O or 25...
Someone is American, they're from Hollywood and you think,
"Oh wow!" You know...
Fuck off, it's bollocks, do you know what I mean?
I used to regularly get phone calls from production companies in the States,
"Hey, we're Global Entertainment, or "We're World Pictures"...
You think, "Fuck off, how much are you going to pay me?"
That's how you deal with these people.
Unfortunately the ill-feeling from that lingers to this day,
certainly with Pat.
The people who lost out there are the readers
and I've never had one reader ask what happened to Fleetway Film and TV.
'What's actually important is that your comic
'has had a whole load of bullshit in it for a while,
'and, as a result, all that money'
which could have gone into reinvesting in characters,
it could have gone to writers and artists, even editors, as a bonus...
'...was just frittered away.'
Thankfully, Andy Diggle turned up as my assistant.
I hired Andy and he said, "What are you doing?
"You are betraying the soul of "2000AD"."
And he was right.
I knew "2000AD". I'd been reading it for 15 years or something by this point.
So I had quite a strong gut feeling of what I felt the comic was
and what it should be and could be,
and also, to a degree, how it had lost its way slightly in the '90s.
The famous catchphrase that he sent out to everybody when he took over,
which was "The shot glass of rocket fuel."
That's what he wanted to do to "2000AD", was turn everything up to 211.
I doubt very much any of us as creators
have still got a copy of his original circular.
I certainly don't have it,
because I would have used it either to burn or as lavatory paper.
The first thing I did was to write a mission statement,
just explaining to all of the creators.
I sent it to the writers and the artists but also to all the creative talent.
It basically said, "You're all crap and I'm the new broom, so I kick arse."
That's basically the summary of it.
And instead of being addressed to, "Dear Pat" or "Hi Pat, here's my thoughts,"
it was marked, "Mills."
I'd experienced what can happen
when Pat doesn't like something and disagrees with a decision,
and in the office it was known as a Mills Bomb.
In the old days it used to be a letter or a package that he would send.
In my day, it was usually a phone call.
Basically being on the receiving end of an hour-long harangue
where you're kind of holding the phone like this
and your hair is being blown sideways.
When Pat's not happy, he lets you know.
You suddenly think, "Hey, that's my child you're fucking with,"
and realise, "Actually, I'm quite angry about it,"
because it's something you've created.
You have to let it go, but you don't want to see it disabled.
You don't want to see it run over,
and you don't want to see it wearing stupid clothes or something.
I can speak my mind and Andy can certainly speak his mind
and Pat loves speaking his mind.
And him and Andy did not get on at all after I left.
At all, at all, at all...
I didn't want to replace Pat,
but at the same time I wasn't happy with the work he was doing.
I certainly wasn't happy with our working relationship.
But he is, credit where it's due,
obviously hugely important to the history of "2000AD".
It's not about bearing a grudge,
but I think it was such an awful period, it does need recording.
And hey, you know, it hasn't been recorded up until now.
I was the assistant editor when Rebellion were negotiating to take over "2000AD".
'We desperately wanted Rebellion to buy,
'because we didn't have a future at Egmont.'
Egmont had only bought "2000AD" as part of a job lot of children's titles,
including Disney titles,
and they simply didn't understand that an adult readership bought "2000AD",
not because of a plastic toy on the front, but because it was fucking good.
We managed to convince the owners
that they had a comic book that wasn't very valuable to them,
would be quite valuable to us, but not that valuable,
and we'd take it off their hands.
Rebellion bought the comic and signed the rights over
'and I became the editor of "2000AD".
'Suddenly it was a complete change - it was a new publisher and a new editor.'
So that was great for me because it was kind of like a clean sweep.
I finally got the power I had craved all these years.
The key thing was really it was a rescue mission.
The policy really was to stabilise,
a bit like hospital, actually, stabilise the patient first,
and then work on getting the patient better.
'But you don't work on that until you've stopped the bleeding,'
and you've noticed there's a bit of bone sticking out that's got to be put back in.
Instantly I've got a boss who is a fan,
and wants to build it back up again instead of tear it down.
They've actually, for the first time in their entire history,
actually had a publisher who's valued them as a property.
(Ian Edginton) 'It's become a tighter ship -
'they've focused on their audience, they know what people want.'
(Rob Williams) The last few years, I genuinely believe,
'the standard of work that's been in it is really, really exciting.
'You look at people like Henry Flint and D'lsraeli
'and you just think there are world-class artists working in the comic.'
The freedom to do what you want gives me the freedom to relax
and just to have a good time with the artwork.
'I don't feel restricted in any way, and that's a wonderful feeling.'
You've also got a very interesting new generation of writers coming up,
'and you've kind of got a willingness to engage with change as well.'
It's just got such a brilliant formula.
It's just seamlessly bringing these new things in,
keeping the old stuff rolling along and not trying to reinvent itself.
'I think as soon as you try and reinvent yourself,
'you're probably in trouble.'
(Ian Edginton) 'They've worked hard, they've built up their IP...'
They've really pushed it and I think that's what is needed,
and the movie has really helped.
(Pat Mills) 'The second "Dredd" movie...
'What really comes over is that'
everyone concerned with it really believes in it.
It's true to them and they're burning with it.
Control: Paramedics to my GPS. Multiple wounded and bodies for Resyk.
(Radio) 'Copy.'
Andrew MacDonald said he could get hold of the rights for "Dredd"
and would I be interested in working on it?
And I immediately said yes,
and I said yes quite aggressively.
Sort of like, "Do not talk to anyone else, I want to work on this."
He listened to things I said.
You know, he didn't always comply with them,
but at least he listened.
And I think what we got there
was a much truer reflection of Judge Dredd and his world.
I was determined to present something that was authentic and true in spirit
to what Wagner had created,
and thankfully, I found an amazing collaborator in Alex Garland.
I made a kind of conscious decision:
I'm going to think of myself as one of the artists.
'Ezquerra and Ron Smith and Mike McMahon and Brian Bolland
'all draw "Dredd" their own way.'
I thought that gave me licence to be like one of those guys and have some freedom.
I love the new "Judge Dredd" film. I feel like it was made for me personally.
It's really fucking violent,
'It's "Judge Dredd" the way it's supposed to be.'
Karl Urban was great.
He had balls enough to say, "I'll play this character
"and never see my face through the whole movie."
The film has garnered a real cult status and a cult following
'and I couldn't be more proud of the film that we've made.'
"2000AD" has always tapped into cultural things going on,
it's never just been a comic.
It's brushed against music, it's brushed against current affairs,
it's brushed against pop culture
and that's informed the comic, and the comic has informed that.
I just think that "2000AD"
has successfully gone beyond comic culture, juvenile culture
and has truly become a force in wider culture.
"Spaced". The sitcom "Spaced" by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg
'and Nick Frost, who've done the "Cornetto Trilogy" since.
'And that was massively... "2000AD" is all over that.'
And Jim Murray and Jason Brashill did the art for that.
'They basically did the art for Simon Pegg to pretend to be drawing.'
We take for granted now that so many Hollywood movies...
There are so many science fiction movies out at the moment,
that in many ways have the look of "2000AD".
'That kind of lived-in, destroyed, threatening,'
oppressive vision of the future, which is so associated with "2000AD".
Unmistakable really.
It's had so much pinched from it over the years.
You know what I mean?
So when the first "Dredd" movie came out, well, you know,
"Robocop" had been there a little bit beforehand.
(Kevin O'Neill) "'Roboc0p" had stolen "Dredd",
'I mean, outrageously. Outrageously.'
The original sculpt of Robocop's helmet is Dredd's helmet.
It's just absolutely identical.
(Rob Williams) 'It's astonishing!
'It's got the little cross hairs of the "Dredd" helmet.'
Ed Neumeier's script is deeply influenced by "Dredd" -
just the combination of extreme violence and kind of political satire.
(Carlos Ezquerra) "'Robocop"...
'Everybody said it was more "Judge Dredd" than "Judge Dredd",
'and when it was in the theatres,
"'Judge Dredd" had to be postponed five years later
'because if not, the public would say it was a copy.'
Come quietly, or there will be trouble.
How on earth did they get away with it? I don't know, all's fair in love and war.
You know, they got there first.
'Paul Verhoeven identified it.'
'They did a far better job than they did on the Stallone "Dredd", a far better job.
'You know? He got it.'
"2000AD" started in 1977.
Whether they admit it or not, it has influenced a lot of people.
They've read it.
People will say, "I never saw that before we came up with such and such a character."
Yes, you did.
Is it "Blood Rayne" which basically bears a stunning resemblance,
purely coincidental I'm sure,
'to Mark Harrison's version of "Durham Red"?
'Gosh, what a surprise.'
(Grant Morrison) 'Even "Transformers" is a bit more like "ABC Warriors"
'than it is like "Transformers".
But it's not enough like "ABC Warriors" to be as good!
The film critic Alan Jones approached me
and he said "They've made a film of one of your comic stories."
I said "I don't think so, Alan."
He said "Yeah, I saw a screening the other night in Soho."
I said, "What's it called?" He said, "Hardware."
At the time, I thought, "This is ripped off from a "Future Shock" I've read
'called "Shok", with Kevin O'Neill artwork.'
So then I start getting phone calls from lawyers telling me
that if I don't sign off on "Hardware"...
...I'll be sued.
I thought, "Oh man, this is typical isn't it?
"You get no respect, you get no money and you're going to get sued as well,
"even though this is something you've not even seen."
(Will Brooker) 'I remember there was some controversy
'and the director of the film had to admit he'd taken it straight from a "Future Shock".'
(Kevin O'Neill) 'It was very, very close.
'But there were no hard feelings, I didn't feel bad about it'
because, as usual, we were all treated like scum anyway.
Didn't really matter. Good luck to Richard Stanley and his film.
I think it's seen as the first "2000AD" film,
which is a bit silly really because it's completely unofficial.
I'm kind of envious of these guys in the media who've taken sparks,
or certainly been inspired by sparks of "2000AD",
and they bring their own creative forces to bear
and they can develop it so much further.
"2000AD" has probably, on some level, influenced everything I've ever written.
(Distant screaming)
"'28 Days Later" was very "2000AD" really,'
because it was cheap, and it was home-grown
and we couldn't do everything as big as anyone else,
so you do it more aggressively than anyone else to compensate for that.
(Shouting)
Making the zombies run, that sensibility to make them run,
that comes from "2000AD".
That's a "2000AD" approach to a zombie movie.
On our last record, there is a track called "Machine Gun",
and I completely direct that back to "2000AD".
(J' PORTISHEAD: "Machine Gun")
'It's like the wasteland of the blue planet that Rogue Trooper was on.'
My first movie, "Timecrimes"...
Some people say, "This is like a 'Twilight Zone' episode,"
'and I think to myself, "This is like a 'Future Shock' story."'
If I hadn't read "Chronocops" back at the time,
I would never have been the director of "Timecrimes".
'In that specific panel in "Chronocops", in which two guys are hidden,
'but you don't see them because you're reading the text,'
when that same panel gets repeated,
but you are following the people in the background,
'you're reading the same panel in a totally different way.'
That, for me, is maybe one of the biggest influences on "Timecrimes".
I storyboarded a film called "The Book of Eli",
'which is a post-apocalyptic thriller, starring Denzel Washington.
'When I got the script, the first thing that went through my mind was
"Yes! This is my chance to put "The Cursed Earth" on the screen."'
See? It's amazing!
"2000AD"...
You find out these people are "2000AD" fans,
and then it all totally makes sense.
"2000AD" has itself now become part of that pop culture
from which it quoted all those years ago.
So I think it's to be expected, and perhaps lauded,
that "2000AD" now will be one of the things that's quoted
by other forms of pop culture.
It just feels like the rest of popular culture has caught up
with what "2000AD" was doing 30 years ago.
There is definitely an influence to the "Batman" movies,
'to the "Superman" movies, the "X-Men" movies,'
even the "Iron Man" movies, whatever...
There is a dark tonality to a lot of it.
Warren Ellis was a huge fan of "Dredd" growing up
'and then he does "The Authority".
'And Mark Millar took a lot of the tones of "The Authority"
'into writing "The Ultimates" for Marvel.
'Then they end up making the Marvel movies
'and suddenly you've got this tone
'of "Dredd" and "The Apocalypse War",
'and it filters its way down through the mainstream.'
Whether the moviemakers are directly influenced by "2000AD" -
they don't even know that they are, but they are.
It's like the influence of "Heart of Darkness".
Novel by Conrad, becomes the film "Apocalypse Now".
More people have contacted "Apocalypse Now" than "Heart of Darkness",
but the influence is "Heart of Darkness", if you trace it back
and I think that's probably how it works with "2000AD".
"2000AD"'s audience...
It had stopped being a mainstream title, it was a niche title.
And once you just relax and embrace the niche,
and go, "OK, so these people love what we do
"and they're going to keep loving it and most of them will stay loyal to us"
and you give them what they want,
but also what they don't realise they want yet,
which is the real trick in commissioning new stories -
giving them what they don't realise is missing from the package.
They've stuck with you this long,
they'll keep going until they're in the ground themselves, so on you go.
I would maintain the auteur nature of "2000AD".
It's one of its great strengths.
And allow people to just do their own characters and express them that way,
and not necessarily continue them
in the way "Superman" or "Batman" have been continued
through generations by different art.
Matt Smith is doing a great job of continuing now.
He's the longest running editor the comic has had, and he totally gets it.
I think all it ever needed was an editor that just really gets it.
It's a comic that very much is open
to freedom for people to tell the kind of stories they want to tell.
'So that in itself makes "2000AD" a unique comic.'
There is an enormous churn of talent coming through all the time,
'and the fact that "2000AD" can still make space for new creators,
'that's important, that it makes space 'for new work to come through all the time.'
They do continue to be willing to experiment
'and you know, you've always got the possibility of something new
'coming round the corner and changing the game.'
I think it appeals to a smart, kind of savvy,
maybe politically-interested reader
in a lot of these things we're talking about, but that's not...
That will never be the mainstream of any media, you know?
Not television, not books, nothing.
In order to become mainstream,
it would have to become palatable to the mainstream,
and in order to become palatable to the mainstream,
it would have to be just as bland and generic
as everything else that's popular out there.
And I don't want to see it turned into fucking "Twilight".
It's given me these weird laws to live to.
I don't want to...
You know, if I can, I don't want to sell out.
I don't want to give my music to corporations.
"'2000AD", I think, totally shaped that, that "No compromise".'
Why should you compromise? "2000AD" didn't compromise.
There is something British about an underdog, you know?
A marginalised figure, you know?
Supporting something which is never going to be big.
But it's plucky, it's a plucky comic.
The people who are into it, we like the fact that...
There's a certain sick part of us that likes the fact that not everybody else likes it.
(Laughs)
I never wanted to be one of these people who would turn my back on "2000AD".
'And I know a lot of people have, but I just never saw the point in that.'
And aside from everything else, I enjoy writing for "2000AD",
and that's the bulk of it.
I have carried on reading the comic and thinking,
"I wish I was drawing that," you know?
Sometimes I regret locking myself into that fixed career path
that was created by other people.
Sometimes I wish I had stayed longer at "2000AD",
or come back to it more often.
We have a lot of people coming back.
You know, they go off on their travels, they go and work for other people,
and then they go, "I'm fed up with just writing another superhero story,
"I've got this really great idea
"about something totally crazy that will only fit in with '2000AD'."
You know, occasionally I'll ring up Matt Smith
and say "Shall I do you a cover?"
In fact, I think it's about time I did another story.
I'm a little bit nervous about doing a little story, but maybe I should.
Oh, it's celebrated 30 odd years now,
it's going celebrate another 30 because it will adapt,
it will change very much like the best of punk,
to remain fresh and relevant in a very, very difficult market.
(Grant Morrison) 'There's always going to be people out there
'who want a comic book you can move on to from the "Beano", when you're 14.'
Suddenly, "Oh my God, there is this thing and it's talking about David Cameron,
"it's talking about how we all feel today."
And now you're left with licensed comics and "2000AD".
It's just a very odd state
for what was once probably the greatest comic business in the world.
Pat's still working for "2000AD". It's like he never left.
Even if something awful were to happen to it,
it's going to carry on in some shape, form or another,
because it's come too far to say,
"OK we'll just pull the plug on this and forget about it."
It's still there, it's lasted, it's absolutely lasted.
"Eagle" didn't last half as long and it was much more respected.
And it was a fucking terrible comic.
(Laughs)
We've always tried to be the best comic out there,
the galaxy's greatest comic.
And I think most people would say we're probably achieving that.
Certainly I've got nothing but good memories of "2000AD",
and I met some people who, to this day, are friends of mine.
It was a lucky break for a lot of us.
It was just sheer unadulterated fun
because it was just a direct connection between you, your mates and the readers.
It doesn't get any better than that. That is the best you can possibly have.
Working for "2000AD",
I am doing the job I wanted to do when I was 11
and it's as good as I thought it would be.
If I wasn't writing for "2000AD" and wasn't working in comics,
I would still be buying "2000AD".
It just gets better and better. I can't believe it, I am a lucky lad.
Just something that has always been in my life, really.
(Laughs)
(Fake sobs)
Even if nothing else, it has given a generation,
or more than one generation,
incredible stories, incredible memories.
You could still get together with people who read "2000AD"
and talk about those stories,
as if you knew the same people, as if you were at the same school,
and as if you have the same friends.
I remember a moment in UKAK, probably about 1990,
and it was me and Simon Bisley and Mark Millar and John Smith,
and Jamie Hewlett, Milligan,
and Bisleyjust lifted his glass and said
"I've never seen so much talent in a single circle ever."
And I still remember it.
"I've got friends here, this is great, I've got pals in this business."
The people is one of the best sides of working in comics, I've found.
There are very few arseholes in comics.
That's what binds the whole industry together -
it's not a desire to make money,
it's not because we want careers in publishing,
it's because we love comic books.
The British comic landscape now would be a wasteland without "2000AD".
"2000AD" is all that remains of a grander plan, I think,
which is a pity, it's a great pity.
You might have a British comic industry left now.
They couldn't see it coming, but by Christ, we could.
We knew it was dying, but too slow.
It's tough and it's strong and I don't think it's going anywhere.
I've grown up with them to such a degree
that they are just part of the background.
I can't imagine comics without "2000AD", I really can't.
All those cool things feel like that.
The British Invasion or the punk scene in the '70s...
You know, these things just happen, weirdly.
I don't know why they happen, but thank God they do, right?
Probably the greatest legacy for "2000AD"
is that it created the modern comic book as we know it.
I have no idea what its legacy will be
apart from that it just made an awful lot of really good comics over the years.
Oh that's... I think legacy is a big word for "2000AD".
I think "Eagle" has a legacy, "2000AD" just has a stain.
It feels like the product of passionate people doing what they love
and I think that really shows, and you can't fake that, I think.
You can't fake it.
It's the Sex Pistols being signed to the major label kind of thing.
That is the brilliant thing about "2000AD".
It's still getting away with it.
It can be considered a British success story.
The fact that it's still here after all this time.
Anyone can make a comic, but there is only one "2000AD".
If Pat Mills hadn't had the courage and guts
and crazy enthusiasm
to put "2000AD" together, against the odds really,
then we wouldn't have "2000AD".
So I think we owe him a massive debt of gratitude.
Fuck off, leave it alone. We got it right.
You don't know what the fuck you're talking about, so just piss off.
(f Punk rock music)