The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

It is really hard to believe that the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic will be thirty years old at the end of this month; I still remember the first issue of 2000 AD arriving in the newsagents staking its claim to its British comics identity with the tag line “forget the superheroes, we’ve got the hyperheroes”. It was 1977; Star Wars was exploding interest in SF and with no video recorders (now all but redundant technology!), no video games and fleapit cinemas with two or perhaps a staggering three (small) screens to choose from the kids really needed to find themselves a regular and accessible SF fix and here it was, in comics form. A revamped Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future with mind-warping aliens drawn by Massimo Belardinelli, dinosaurs versus futuristic, time-travelling cowboys in Flesh, Aeroball with the Harlem Heroes and some future cop story with the odd name Judge Dredd…

Flash forward three decades; the punk era is gone but leaves ripples and echoes in its influential wake and SF is bigger than ever. 2000 AD has become a launching pad for some of the top talent in the world-wide comics industry – remember those early Alan Moore two and three page short Future Shocks stories? Boy, look at him now. Dredd has grown to become probably the biggest character in British comics, eclipsing even the legendary Dan Dare, while on the approach to the thirtieth anniversary Brit comics icon John Wagner once more writes the lawman’s tales, exploring his beginnings in Origins with Dredd’s original conceptual artist Carlos Ezquerra riding pillion on the Lawmaster bike.

Yeah, I’m a fanboy, so what? I loved it then and I love it now, as regular readers of the blog will know; I’ve been having a blast reading the classic material Rebellion has been printing beginning with Judge Dredd the Complete Case Files series, collecting all of Dredd’s tales in chronological order, eventually set to build into a library of three decades of top Brit comics (John Wagner, Alan Grant, Cam Kennedy, Mike McMahon, Brian Bolland, Carlos Ezquerra, Steve Dillon and many, many more). Then flush with this success came The Complete Nemesis the Warlock Volume 1; the great Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill screwing around with ideas, characters and comics storylines, twisting them to give us something different, sometimes perplexing but always fascinating. Kev’s bizarre aliens and strange future architecture were mind blowing and in later stories like the Gothic Empire (an alien race of mimics have a steampunk future based on the British Empire of the Victorian era) you can see early intimations of some of the artwork he would delight us with in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen decades later. And then the bloody brilliant Bryan Talbot contributed his brushes to it as well.

If we’re still reading it thirty years later the writers and artists obviously did something right – and the number of you picking up some of these books testifies to their enduring appeal. We just couldn’t let such a landmark birthday like this go past without noting it – thirty drokking years! – so we talked to the guys at Rebellion and guess what? Courtesy of Rebellion we have the Judge Dredd Case Files Volume 5 signed by John Wagner and Alan Grant and a copy of the Complete Nemesis the Warlock Volume 1 signed by Pat Mills himself. And all you have to do to get your hands on this pair of utterly zarjaz, totally collectable prizes (dammit, I want these myself!) is to head on over to our main website and answer one incredibly easy question to be in with a chance. You’ve got two weeks to get those entries in there, folks, so get logged on and get your answers in by Wednesday 21st of February – first correct answer out of the hat will win these signed volumes to add to their collection; first wrong answer gets a one-way trip to the Cursed Earth mines (okay, maybe not). Good luck to all.