I’ve been reading 2000AD again and Thistlebone and Brink are great!

Borag Thungg! When things like Woolworths go bust, people who haven’t been to Woolworths for years feel sad and say “Why can’t the old things I liked survive?”.

So at the start of the pandemic I worried about things going out of business that I liked the idea of but didn’t really use at that point, and subscribed to a few things. Like a membership of Walthamstow Trades Hall, where I now hang out regularly, and a monthly delivery of the Fortean Times, which I hope to retire into writing for, plus some people and organisations that had Patreons, to do my bit to help tide them over. Earlier this year I added another to that list – a 2000AD magazine subscription.

I got given a massive stack of 2000AD, Eagle, Tiger, Roy of the Rovers etc comics at some point in the 1980s, but I hadn’t picked up any comics or graphic novels for decades. So when I thought of supporting 2000AD earlier in the year I picked a prog that seemed to be a good jumping on point – #2364 – as a new Judge Dredd strip started and it also featured the start of folk horror series Thistlebone by TC Eglington and Simon Davis, which appeared to be very much in my wheelhouse.

I was immediately gripped by Thistlebone, which was upfront about it being the third story in the series, and so very quickly I purchased the first two books, which were brilliant. A new hobby quickly spiralling out of control into endless expense and collecting again, Martin? Who can say.

Well, strictly in fairness, I haven’t delved into the back issues of every strip that has run this year. Rogue Trooper and Judge Dredd have been going so long that it seems futile to suddenly get completist about them. And some stories, like Proteus Vex, which had a long 2024 run in 2000AD, were entertaining enough, but I didn’t get drawn in so much that I felt I needed to read the entire canon.

I also read comics like a grown-up these days. I’ve got enough to keep my head around with work, without adding five extra weekly serials to the load, so instead of reading 2000AD when it arrives I tend to put them in my magazine rack in order, and then sit down every few weeks with a whole fresh stack of issues to go through. A Saturday or Sunday morning, and an hour spent with a nice coffee, several progs to read through, and a specific comic-reading playlist of ambient and spaceship-sounding instrumental electronica as a soundtrack to help me focus with artists like Seefeel, Autocreation, Richard H Kirk, B12, Juno Reactor, Halina Rice and Bola.

And if a serial hasn’t gripped or entertained me in the first couple of parts, I’m happy to skip it. After all you aren’t obliged to watch the whole of a TV series if the first couple of episodes bore you, and you aren’t obliged to finish listening to an album if you think the first two tracks aren’t to your liking, so why should a weekly comic be any different to that?

The other scrotnig story I have absolutely loved enough though to have gone back to get as much of the origins as I can is Brink, by Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard.

A police procedural set in the late 21st century when Earth has been depopulated and everybody remaining is living in cramped space stations, I was getting along understanding it just fine, when a letter from a reader in Prog #2391 mentioned there were previous stories. So in the space of a week I’d bought and devoured the first three compiled volumes in their digital editions. I’ve enjoyed it so much, and I have two more volumes to go.

Anybody following my movie reviews will know I love a bit of ambiguity, and, at least at the start, the story is carefully constructed such that it is never entirely clear whether, in fact, what is happening is that the whole of the surviving human race is having a collective hallucinatory nervous breakdown after a few years of being kept in confined spaces and subjected to ultra-processed food, compulsory anti-depressants, and extreme late-stage capitalism. Or whether there are actually space demons. Zarjaz stuff.

The comic has always been political, and this year a Judge Dredd storyline about a bid to get better outcomes by defunding the justice department in favour of social services investment fell into that tradition.

[A panel from Judge Dredd strip ‘A Better World’ about attempts to defund the justice system in Mega City One]

I’ve also particularly enjoyed another Judge Dredd storyline that involved a lot of futuristic Scottish colloquialisms as some mad religious guys from the Caledonian Habitation Zone rocked up in Mega City One on a bounty hunt, and episodes that echoed season one of the Terror, with Dredd stranded out in icy wastelands pursued by a massive bear.

Still, as I get older I’m less inclined to keep stacking up nerdy things my kids will just throw away when I die, so I’m planning on paying it forward and giving away the comics on our local Facebook sell or swap group at some point, in the hope the thrill-power kindles or rekindles someone else’s interest in British comic culture, just like that gift of a stack of comics served me so well in the 1980s. Splundig vur Thrigg!