Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD

At the age of 9 I read the very first edition of 2000ad in 1977 and continued to enjoy the dark comic reality show until the late 1990s. This documentary was interesting . It did have several flaws for me. I wanted to hear about the character development more and the story lines. But, and everything that comes after but is usually bullshit, but in this case it is not:-) I see this documentary as a story of artists disenfranchised, and as such it is merely a another dark story, albeit uninspiring and just sad . Apologies if my judgement upsets you mere mortals

Britain was troubled in the late seventies. The unions were on strike and dead bodies were piling up in the streets; or was it garbage? There were power cuts when the coal miners stopped work and industry became even less industrious than usual as the lights went out. In desperation the public voted Margaret Thatcher into power, a polarising figure who led us into an age of riots and street protests. Brixton burned. Saint Paul's in Bristol burned a bit too and I lived quite near. Punk rock arrived and rebellion was in the air.

Rebellion owns 2000AD now, of course, but in the beginning - February 1977 - it was put out by staid Scottish publisher I.P.C. Magazines. The management were pipe smoking ex-cavalrymen in tweeds. Pat Mills, one of the founders, says that British comics were dire at the time, especially the boys stuff. Mills says the girls comics were more intelligent and had some emotional depth. He quite enjoyed writing them. However, a boy grew up reading funnies like the Beano and the Dandy but after that had nowhere to go. Well, he did, actually. He could go read the American comics like I did and like most of the creators of 2000AD did.

So Mills founded Action a realistic, violent comic which fell afoul of the censors. He was trying to give kids the feel of those movies they weren't allowed to see, like Death Wish. Then someone told someone at the publishers that a film called Star Wars was going to be huge and SF was the new trend. Keen to cash in they agreed to let Mills start a new SF comic called 2000AD. It was still in the British anthology format but slightly different in that each strip had five or six pages per episode rather than two. This gave the artists and writers more leeway. Older comics tended to have about nine small panels to the page. With more room the artists could do bigger, splashier layouts in the style of those American comics many of them loved.

Not that 2000AD was an American clone. No, sir. I think the Comics Code Authority would have jumped on it like a ton of bricks. 2000AD was largely built up by the creators interviewed here: Pat Mills, John Wagner, Grant Morrison, Neal Gaiman, Dave Gibbons and of course many others. Pat Mills, as his interviews show, is a feisty, rebellious fellow of Irish descent with a sincere grudge against the middle class, the Catholic Church and the English establishment. The others were young free spirits with anarchic tendencies but I get the impression he was the driving force. They all loved comics as a medium but wanted to do something different, and did. 2000AD was full of violence, gore, shocks etc. but also had a sense of humour, generally black. In 1978 I was at that age where you feel silly reading comics and want to pursue girls and drink (Neil Gaiman confesses to the same thing here) so I didn't read it at the time but I have read a lot of the collected reprints and I think the dark wit was best thing about it. Pat Mills was a fan of the English satirical magazine Private-Eye and that had some influence.

There are loads of interesting facts here. Judge Dredd started out slow but became more popular as time went on. The favourite strip at first was some violent fellow called M.A.C.H. 1. The film gives background information on such famous strips as Strontium Dog, Slaine, Rogue Trooper, ABC Warriors, Halo Jones, D.R. and Quinch and the joyous little Future Shocks, short stories where new writers cut their teeth. All the writers say that the discipline of doing Future Shocks, having to tell a proper, structured story in such a tiny space, forced them to do better and was a great training exercise. Future Shocks were the foot in the door, not just one but ten or twenty sometimes before you'd get more work. Alan Moore did about forty before he managed to land a whole strip for himself. The rest is history.

Big Al is missing here. I guess he didn't want to take part. Everyone else says nice things about his work, unsurprisingly, and Neil Gaiman deeply laments the fact that The Ballad of Halo Jones was left unfinished. He said Moore took two hours one day to tell him the rest of the story and he ended up in tears. Moore has gone on to other things now so we're unlikely ever to see it, alas.

Karen Berger features a lot, too. Who she? Karen is the young lady from DC Comics who came over here with Dick Giordano, poached all the 2000AD talent and took it off to America to do other things, mainly with the Vertigo imprint. Alan Moore and Brian Bolland were the first to go. For a while 2000AD became a shop window for American companies, something that Pat Mills deeply resented. Happily, some of them remember their roots and still do work for it now and then, just for fun.

Disc one is the main story of 2000AD and it's terrific. Plenty of splashy graphics on show as you might expect. It's mainly told through interviews. Disc two features the extras which are extended interviews with the same people. Pat Mills' was about an hour! In some ways Disc 2 was even more interesting that Disc 1.

Together they make a fine, engrossing package. I was glued to the screen. This is a must have for any fan of 2000AD and any comics historian.

Eamonn Murphy

You get a standard doc of talking heads, clips, and artwork but they do a good job of explaining the main characters and why the comic worked, even if it does go a little sour on some people and their practices. But for an overview of the comic's life, it's exactly as promised and worth a look.

I wasn't into 2000AD when I was young, didn't know anyone who really was, which was my loss. Once you read a few of their mags, your eyes are opened and you see the quality and originality of what they have been striving to do.

This documentary is a down to earth talking heads history of those who built & fashioned the comic & characters over all these years. We don't get much in the way of comic shots or nasty stories, we have the whole spate of familiar & legendary names giving us their frank opinion on the whole comic.

Its place in the annals of comic history is indisputable, and this documentary is recording for posterity those views.

There is nothing necessarily special in this doc, it was trying to record lives and history, and it achieves that.

If you're interested in comics then this is great, for 2000AD fans it is indispensable. Enjoy and be enlightened. Need to dig out those old Dredd anthology volumes again for a good old read.

This is definitely an interesting documentary that explores the history of the 2000AD comic book from it's inception in 1977 to 2014. Many of the writers, artists, editors and creators make appearances in the film to talk about their unique experiences working on 2000AD. I am new to the world of 2000AD and know very little about the history of the comic so for someone like myself this documentary was filled with a lot of fresh information and history. I would definitely recommend this documentary to any fan of 2000AD but I don't think it will be as informative to long time readers of 2000AD simply because it talks more about the history of the comic book itself rather than the opinions and stories of the creators themselves.

I didn't start reading 2000AD until 2019 I had heard of the comic when I was growing up because of the Judge Dredd character. I came across a pile of old issues of 2000AD in a small comic book store for 50p an issue the image on the cover of the first issue I picked up was of Judge Dredd and my immediate thought was of the Dredd (2012) movie starring Karl Urban. I thought to myself Dredd was an awesome movie so maybe the comics are worth reading so I grabbed a handful of random 2000AD issues and decided to give them a read.

I am so glad I gave 2000AD a chance because after reading just a few old issues from the 1980s I wanted to read even more. I have since read as many of the old issues as I can find in my local comic book stores. I even signed up for of a subscription to the comic so I can get the latest issues delivered to my home. I'm a little to party but it's never too late to start a new hobby.

2000AD is filled with some of the most inventive and most violent stories you can imagine from classic characters and stories that continue to this day to a whole new generation of characters in the newer issues. 2000AD continues to thrive and provide unique, original and interesting stories that are so violent and over the top with absolutely beautiful artwork where the blood leaps off the pages.