28 Days of 2000 AD #23: Dark Bish-OP Pt. 4

In preparation for writing THRILL-POWER OVERLOAD, I interviewed myself about my experiences with 2000 AD. Here's another chunk of excerpts, beginning with my memories of Prog 113, which a series of stories about Dante and his Romanov siblings...

DAVID BISHOP Pt. 4

Robbie write a slew of these stories, aimed at developing the characters of Dante’s half-siblings. As a series these probably went on too long and suffered from having too many different artists drawing them. Dante is best with just one or two regular artists.

Prog 1125 – Scorpion Dance – lotta Dredd threads come together, DeMarco quits...

That story was the culmination of a bunch of plot threads Wagner had been developing since 1995 – the Frendz, DeMarco and her infatuation with Dredd, Judge Jura Edgar of the PSU. It was great to see it all come together.

Prog 1127 – Eurocrash begins for SinDex...

That was probably the first of the big epics in 1999. It became a year-long saga for Sinister Dexter as their partnership fell apart, the city of Downlode was nearly reduced to rubble and the deaths of several main characters. Up to then Sinister Dexter had been a comedy strip with a few serious stories – 1999 completely reversed that. It went on too long, but it was a great run of stories. You felt anything could happen, anyone could die – all bets were off.

Prog 1128 – Balls Brothers begins...

That was the first new series Wagner had created for 2000 AD in a decade, at least. Outright comedy strips have a hard time with the readers. They prefer grim and gritty to grinning. Humour in the context of adventure and jeopardy is fine – just look at the success of Robo-Hunter. But pure comedy is rarely a hit. About the only example I can think of is D.R. & Quinch. So the Balls Brothers struggled to convince the readers, despite having creators with the calibre of Wagner and Kevin Walker attached. A shame, I really liked it.

Prog 1135 – first Banzai Battalion...

The Dredd strip is very good at generating new characters who can then go on to enjoy their own adventures. That just shows how talented Wagner is as a writer. Banzai Battalion first appeared in this prog and immediately struck a chord with readers. They were an inspired creation and have come back at least two times since. Great fun.

Prog 1141 – Doomsday begins, ends 1164...

The problem with Dredd mega-epics is that it strains credibility for cataclysmic events to be happening in 2000 AD’s Dredd strip but not rate a mention in the character’s own Megazine. You end up with anomalies like Inferno, that never got mentioned once in the Meg. On the other hand, readers who only buy one of the two titles take umbrage when mega-epics appear in both titles as a crossover strip.

Doomsday was an attempt to resolve that dilemma. It featured a mega-epic storyline in both titles, but with the action between told from different points on view in each one. The episodes in 2000 AD followed what happened to Dredd while the Megazine concentrated on what happened to Mega-City One and particularly former Judge Galen DeMarco. In the end Doomsday was a good yarn but only a partial success at achieving its aims.

May 1999 – Rebellion first tries to buy 2000 AD...

I found out about this by accident. I was due to go on holiday for a week. On my final day I came into the office early and found a fax to managing director Julie Goldsmith about a proposal for Rebellion to buy 2000 AD and the Megazine. The fax had been sent to the machine near our desks, instead of to Julie’s private fax machine in her office. I took the fax upstairs and handed it to her, causing great consternation. The negotiations had been kept very quiet and the editorial team was not supposed to know. But now the secret was out.

I got very excited at the prospect of Rebellion buying the comic. Both Andy and I were getting increasingly frustrated by Egmont Fleetway’s attitude to 2000 AD. It was just a cash cow to the managers, and they were trying to squeeze every last penny out of it. They didn’t care about the future of 2000 AD and were doing nothing to develop or promote it. Rebellion seemed like the white knight, charging in to save us.

Then it all went wrong. The deal fell apart and we were left right back where we started. Andy and I meet Jason in a Soho pub afterwards and persuaded him not to give up on the idea. But the collapse of the Rebellion deal led me to make a major decision. I’d been editing the Megazine and 2000 AD for nearly a decade, I wanted to move on. I could see that if I stuck around any longer I’d be in danger of getting trapped, unable to find work elsewhere. I tried to find other opportunities elsewhere within Egmont but to no avail. So I started applying for jobs elsewhere.

Prog 1149 – Devlin Waugh transfers to 2000 AD from the Megazine...

Another Megazine refugee comes to 2000 AD. The Dredd reprints had been replaced by Preacher but there was still no room for old favourites like Devlin. In 1999 pre-millennium tension was reaching its apogee and Sirius Rising was commissioned to accompany that. Sirius Rising was one of the longest non-Dredd stories ever to appear in the weekly, running over six months. It would have been even longer but I had to make John Smith cut several episodes from the middle and kept the ending as tight as possible.

Prog 1151 – Rose O’Rion gets own series...

Rose O’Rion had made her debut in Pulp Sci-Fi and proved popular enough to merit a sequel. This was her first full-length series but it never quite worked. Lots of potential but no pizzazz. Artist Andy Clarke would go on to bigger and better things.

Prog 1161 – classic Dante tale The Courtship of Jena Makarov begins...

This was the big one, what everything else had been leading up to for nearly three years. By the time the story finished, the Empire was at war. The final episode was heart-breaking stuff and I don’t think Simon Fraser’s art has ever been better. A gem in a run of gems.

Prog 1164 – lost Hap Hazzard story published...

I discovered this artwork while cleaning out the drawers during one of our frequent shifts inside the office. Hap Hazzard had first appeared in a Future Shock written and drawn by Steve Dillon. He did another five Hap Hazzard strips between 1988 and 1989, but only four of them had seen print. The fifth got lost in the mists of time and eventually turned up a decade later. The script to accompany the art had long since disappeared, so we needed a new script. With Steve’s blessing, we held a competition inviting readers to have a go at writing a script to fit the art. A bit of an oddity but still fun.

Prog 1165 – Nemesis Book X at last...

With the year 2000 fast approaching, the time seemed right to wrap up a lot of lost ends from 2000 AD’s past. One of these was Nemesis the Warlock. He had appeared in short stories and teamed up with other characters, but there hadn’t been a major Nemesis series since Deathbringer back in 1989. The time seemed right to present the tenth and last book of the saga, The Final Conflict.

Henry Flint’s art was a revelation. He really went for it, trying to capture that old school feel in his pages, right down to laboriously cutting up sheets of aged mechanical tone to get the same effects on his art the original pages of Nemesis had. His art seemed to evoke the spirit of early Kevin O’Neill without trying to be a clone of O’Neill’s unique style.

How did Prog 2000 come about?

I can’t remember who first suggested publishing a 100-page, end of year special issue – but I remember lobbying long and hard for it to happen. There was concern from management that readers would not be willing to pay £3.95 for Prog 2000, but I believed in the concept. Sales did rise whenever we published one of our 48-page progs that stayed on sale for a fortnight. By having the issue on sale for longer, we gave people more chance to see and buy it. Even allowing for the fact Prog 2000 would be on sale over the Christmas and New Year holidays, I was still convinced it would out-sell regular issues. It did – we sold thousands of extra copies, sales went up by 40%.

Once we’d got approval to do Prog 2000, I wanted it to be a very special edition. For a start, this was to be the final issue before the year 2000, so it had to reflect reaching that milestone. Also, I wanted it to be my final issue as editor. That didn’t happen because the job I thought I had lined up at another publisher fell through. But I still wanted Prog 2000 is be a real landmark, something everyone involved could be proud of.

We got Mike McMahon back drawing a Dredd strip in 2000 AD for the first time since Block Mania 18 years earlier. We got Dave Gibbons back drawing a Rogue Trooper story in 2000 AD for the first time in 18 years. We got Kevin O’Neill to draw the final ever episode of Nemesis the Warlock. John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra brought back Johnny Alpha as Strontium Dog for the first time in nearly a decade. It wasn’t just old favourites either. Prog 2000 had the epilogue to Dante’s Courtship story, which sent the saga hurtling towards war. And it began Glimmer Rats. I’d have to say Prog 2000 was the best single issue I was ever involved with. Everything after seemed like an anti-climax.

Prog 1178 – Badlands © Abnett & Walker...

That was an example of high-quality emergency filler. Kevin Walker had pitched it to 2000 AD when John Tomlinson was editor. It got turned down but the samples never got sent back. I found them just at the moment when another series went horribly late. I needed filler in a hurry. Dan and Kevin agreed to rework their original strip, adding new pages and revising the script. It worked quite well in the end – better than having five shoddy Future Shocks instead!

Prog 1183 – Dante’s Tsar Wars begins, planned for 5 books, becomes four...

The war between the Tsar and Romanovs had been brewing since the first episode of Dante three years earlier. The Tsar Wars saga was originally planned as five books of eight parts each, running to a massive 240 pages. John Burns painted the first book, The Rudinshtein Irregulars. He had mostly been painting Dredds for 2000 AD but requested the chance to do a Dante script. I later discovered he was passionate about the style and setting of the series, having always wanted to paint something like it. His painted pages a revelation of Dante, giving it a depth and lustre not seen in previous episodes that had been coloured line art.

Prog 1186 – Dredd clones revealed, leads to new Judge Rico...

This was a real bolt from the blue, a Wagner curveball. Introducing the young clone of Dredd made a lot of readers question whether Old Stony Face was going to be phased out. It also gave John a chance to further incorporate Dredd’s brother Rico into the mythos. That story is notable because it’s the only time you get to properly see Dredd’s face in the comic. He is shown as a young cadet in Prog 1187 for one panel, drawn by Simon Fraser. I remember Wagner was less than impressed about that, but it never occurred to me there would be a problem. Dredd is so young in that image – it gives you no idea what he would look like as an adult with his helmet off. The story title, Blood Cadets, was recycled from the aborted Dredd Fortnightly dummy prepared in 1984.

Bishop resigns!

In March 2000 I gave Fleetway three months notice that I was resigning as editor. My wife had got a job in Scotland and I decided I would quit and go freelance. I was felt burnt out and Andy was so eager to get hold the comic and make it his own. I knew it was time to go.

Ironically, just after I handed in my resignation, Rebellion reappeared on the scene. Jason and Chris still wanted to buy the comic and its characters and so negotiations started again. I was almost tempted to stick around, it felt like a new beginning for the comic – that was what I wanted. But I also wanted to be do other things and Rebellion’s arrival wouldn’t change that. Plus there was no guarantee the deal wouldn’t fall apart again, just as it had in 1999.

Fleetway buggered about for weeks on end before finally seeing sense and appointing Andy as the new editor. Once they did I gave him total control of the comic and I resumed editing the Megazine for the third time. Fleetway agreed that I would continue editing the Megazine on a freelance basis when I left, while the Rebellion takeover ran its course.

Prog 1191 – first Tales of Telguuth...

Andy was a big fan of Steve Moore’s writing for Warrior, particularly Axel Pressbutton. Andy was very good at searching out his comic heroes from the early 1980s and getting them to work for 2000 AD. Steve Moore agreed to create new strips for the weekly. Tales of Telguuth was a fantasy series with an anthology format. The stories were mostly one-off tales, set in this magical world. It wasn’t really my cup of tea.

June 2000 – Bishop resigns, Diggle becomes editor, Matt Smith joins...

I left at the end of June, just as Rebellion was taking over. I’d only been gone a week or two when I was back again, flying down from Scotland three days a week for three weeks to help Matt get the comic out while Andy was away on his honeymoon. I kept editing the Megazine freelance. I thought it would only last three or four months but I ended up doing that for a year and a half!

Prog 1200 – Red Fang debuts, 2000 gets thinner, price rise to £1.40...

The comic got thinner again with Prog 1200. Other companies in the Egmont empire were reprinting 2000 AD material in US comics format, which is smaller and thinner than 2000 AD had been. Also, Fleetway had hoped to penetrate the US comics market too. So we made the comic thinner to get it into the same proportions as American comics. That took readers a while to adjust to, but you don’t notice it at all now.