Happy 25th birthday, Dredd
Drokking Hell, as Judge Dredd would put it: 2000AD, the sci-fi and fantasy comic which brought the futuristic lawman to public attention, celebrates 25 years of publication this week.
Launched by IPC on 26 February, 1977, into a market full of war comics, 2000AD cashed in on the sci-fi hype surrounding Star Wars, but had a quirky, distinctly British attitude. Within a few years, the comic - which also featured reluctant British super-agent MACH 1 and an aggressively reinvented Dan Dare - was selling 100,000 copies a week.
Today, it has around a quarter of its Eighties circulation, and the spinoff, Judge Dredd: the Megazine, sells only 8,000 to 10,000 copies each month. But its very existence is something to celebrate: within a few years of its launch, 2000AD had absorbed its in-house competitors Starlord and Tornado while other rivals, such as Revolver, Crisis and Toxic, no longer exist today.
The editor of 2000AD is no ordinary hack. A green alien called Tharg the Mighty, he comes from Betelgeuse, tyrannises his staff of art and script "droids" and patronises his "earthlet" readers. He also makes regular appearances in his own publication.
The real-life Tharg is Matt Smith, a 2000AD fan who took the job two years ago. He says: "It's always had an anarchic bent to it, because it was born out of the punk era." It also treated its readers like grownups, smuggling smart wit and social issues into the action. Smith cites the satirical Dredd as "a warning of a future totalitarian state".
Smith admits that most of his readers are grown up; their average age is 30. The comic is now "pretty much down to the core readership, who have grown up with it".
He adds: "There's a general decline in comics here compared to America or Japan." As a weekly, 2000AD has never competed with the monthly American rivals - DC, Marvel and their imitators - or with home-grown "juvenile" comics like Beano and Dandy. Still, the popularity of sci-fi and fantasy (Buffy, X-Files, Lord of the Rings) and the 1995 Judge Dredd movie starring Sylvester Stallone, failed to halt the fall in sales.
Now, though, 2000AD has been bought by Oxford company Rebellion, which plans to develop its characters into computer games, and have signed a deal for two new, lower-budget Dredd movies. Reason enough, perhaps, for Smith and his readers to party at the Ministry of Sound tomorrow night to celebrate the comic's remarkable quarter-century. Judge Dredd will probably be there too, though, knowing him, he'll be telling everyone to keep the drokking noise down.
