The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

I’ve said before that re-reading some of the classic 2000 AD strips – even allowing for my rose-tinted nostalgia glasses – reminds me not only what great strips they were (and are) but how often they contained ideas that were far ahead of their time, ideas that were a satirical, exaggerated take on society which, three decades down the line, now seem more relevant and sadly more realistic and less satirical than before. Speaking ahead of tonight’s Edinburgh Lecture “Writing Tomorrow Yesterday: How Fiction Became Reality”, Scots comics writing legend Alan Grant talked to the Sunday Herald and it seems that Alan, re-reading some of his own comic scripts from older Judge Dredd tales, has come to a similar conclusion and he’s finding it a bit of a downer:

“I do actually get depressed. Part of that is because when we did them originally we had such a laugh. John Wagner and I used to laugh ourselves stupid. The artists would send us the artwork and when we saw the world’s first two-ton man – Two Ton Tony Tubbs – we were in hysterics… It’s sad now that so many Scottish children are going to be obese. It’s not funny anymore. I find it hard to write Judge Dredd now, I really do…. It’s pretty horrific when you realise that what you’ve written, admittedly an extrapolation of a trend, has got stronger and stronger,” Alan Grant talking to the Sunday Herald. (link via Neorama)