All Tomorrow’s Progs: An Exclusive Preview of “2000AD: Winter Special ’14”

There’s almost the intensity of a drumline to it, when you crack open and read “Tharg’s Nerve Center” for the first time. A John Bonham backbeat, a Jimi Hendrix riff is needed to support the electric intensity of your nervous system reaching out beyond itself, and into the pages of the 2000 AD Winter Special, 2014. And never more so than when you read “Borag Thungg, Earthlets,” and Tharg, the congenial conquering alien editor of 2000 AD, gets into the meat of how the mag hasn’t put Specials for the last 18 years, but that’s changed now. 2000 AD’s put out a Summer Special earlier this year, and now its sticking to the game plan and putting out a Winter Special this fall.

It’s a bundle, something to light a way through the coming winter. In its folds you’ll find a Mega-City One double bill, an episode of Judge Dredd as well as Anderson: Psi-Division. Bold new stories in the form of “The Alienist” and “Terror Tales: Phantom Pains.” And 2000 AD stalwarts in “Rouge Trooper” and “Defoe.”

But the true magic in the 2000 AD Winter Special lies in how editors and creators alike have leveraged that 18 year hiatus into a workable thematic to be able to comment on the current politics of the day.

The 2000 AD Specials have been away for 18 years. In that gap, someone got born, learned to ride a bike, catch a baseball, went to school for the first time, kissed someone for the first time, graduated high school and moved out of the house to go to college. If the first Summer Special earlier this year was a “proof of principle” issue to show how 2000 AD Specials could do well for UK-based publisher Rebellion, then this fall’s Winter Special is all about addressing the publisher’s, and the publication’s, legacy.

Specifically developing an up-to-date-for-the-Millennium position on what has always been the mag’s original legacy statement; crafting an artistic response to the garish vision of society that must be come to pass when failed policies are taken to their logical extent. In this sense 2000 AD really is best served by its own origins in Thatcherite and pre-Thatcherite Britain. Just one generation after postwar Britain, governmental policies focused on building large-scale social infrastructure (like free healthcare and mass employment) were precariously balanced.

What 2000 AD was able to do, as far back as the early ’80s, was offer more than a mere political commentary on government policies—instead it offered artistic meditation on the consequences of such policies. Rather than bemoan a housing crisis, say, those early “progs” of the mag would simply tell a tale set against the backdrop of urban decay and overpopulation that is Mega-City One.

Two days ago in an interview with Charlie Rose, writer Martin Amis suggested that German philosopher and humanitarian Theodor Adorno’s motto “no poetry after Auschwitz,” must be reconsidered. And that poets and novelists and historians are like air crash investigators, ensuring that the “crash” of history need never again happen for the reasons it did at that time. 2000 AD crossed into that territory already in the 1980s, by resisting the urge to offer commentary, and instead giving us apocalyptic visions of the likely consequences of bad policymaking.

This is where the 2000 AD Winter Special comes in.

How does 2000 AD reclaim the artistic high ground that always was its legacy? Especially after an absence of 18 years on the popcultural stage? One way would be (and gratefully, this is exactly the route that publisher Rebellion does take) to address the issue of the 18 year hiatus, if not directly then at least thematically. What makes the 2000 AD Winter Special so engaging is that Matt Smith (real life current Editor of the mag, rather than the fictive Tharg the Mighty) is able to conceive the hiatus as more than a hiatus—to conceive of it as a gap. And then to translate this “gap” as in infrastructural weakness within society.

What we see in the pages of the Winter Special is classic and pure 2000 AD. At a time when jihadis threaten and when super-virus epidemics threaten, when the democratic institution of freedom of movement is itself under threat because of such pressures, Rebellion is able to put out a book that deals with the inherent cracks in the social infrastructure.

To be able to fully appreciate the 2000 AD Winter Special you’d need to loop Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” on iTunes and loop the E3 official trailer of Tom Clancy’s The Division on YouTube.

Because like Hendrix, the Winter Special is about a “slight return” to your roots (for Hendrix it was his roots as a blues musician), but with powerful capabilities and talents. Capabilities and talents powerful enough to redefine your the business-as-usual of your origins. For 2000 AD these origins lie in the artistic meditation on the vagaries and the excesses of failed public policy. But like Hendrix with “Voodoo Child”, this Winter Special marks a point where 2000 AD evolve their origins. And the target for artistic meditation in 2000 AD is not just failure of poorly-drafted public policy, but of inherent weakness of civil infrastructure, and of society itself.

It’s in this regard that the Winter Special actually shares a strong thematic link with Tom Clancy’s The Division. On the surface The Division is very much your standard Tom Clancy plan & shoot game. But thematically, The Division deals with the inherent frailty of society, and living in the wake of a series of micro-apocalypses, some of these biological in nature, some political, some of these terrorist in design.

“It’s hard to watch something you love destroy itself,” the chilling trailer to The Division opens, “to see it fall apart. Disaster always feels so distant, detached. Someone else’s struggle in some faraway place. It’s not until it’s in our city, at our doors that we realize how fragile we are. All of us, all of this… Tragedy is invisible. People turn from it, people run from it if they can. And it’s hard knowing that you belong here, that your purpose lies amongst all this pain. But someone’s got to be there to pick it up, to push back, to put the first piece back together.”

Gaps are everywhere in the stories of the Winter Special. Rogue Trooper passes out while honoring the fallen dead, only to find himself targeted by a psychedelic predator. In “Frankensteiner,” this installment of “Defoe” (which deals with civil breakdown during a zombie apocalypse coinciding with the Great Plague in London of 1666), Defoe himself is rendered unconscious while Frankensteiner (collaborating with none other than Sir Isaac Newton) gets to work on transplanting Defoe’s heart into a zombie. And even in the Special’s installment of “Judge Dredd,” the theme of the gap between news media and entertainment is treated to an incisive consideration.

But the jewel of the Winter Special really is “Anderson: Psi-Div’s” “Horror comes to Velma Dinkley.” Written by comics veteran Alan Grant, this story sees Judge Anderson investigate the deliberate hacking to of a VR game (a VR “horror slug,” for those Mega-Citizens in the know) that ends in a family slaying. Grant setups the “regular” themes of fear and isolation, specifically from loneliness and bullying, but also weaves a tale that demonstrates how this childhood ideation of fear and bullying is easily extrapolated into the adult world of mainstream society. But perhaps the most chilling line is “A devious mind like his should be working for the Law, not against it.” It’s in this way that Grant raises the specter of possible corporate and government complicity in creating a marketplace for loneliness and isolation.

The beauty in 2000 AD and especially in the Winter Special lies in how the magazine is able to resist transforming itself into a Socialist critique of society, with all the wisdom of a sophomore term paper. And yet, simultaneously resist becoming a garish parody of itself. Like TIME or MAD Magazine, 2000AD has maintained an uncanny ability to reinvent itself and remain particularly relevant to the kind of society it faces.

In the closing Act of Henry V, Shakespeare writes for Henry to say: “…the elder I wax, the better I shall appear. My comfort is that old age, that ill layer-up of beauty, can do no more spoil upon my face. Thou hast me, if thou hast me, at the worst, and thou shalt wear me, if thou wear me, better and better.” And of course the opposite is true for 2000 AD, which started at a peak, and only ever maintained that level of quality.

2000 AD falls into that rare category of things (not so rare in comics) that are better closer up, than their legends suggest they are from afar. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Silver Age, the Golden Age, the Avengers, comics consistently seems to produce theses magnificent throughlines of popculture. And if you haven’t dove into 2000 AD in a while, or perhaps never have, there’s hardly a better time than with the Winter Special.

The 2000 AD Winter Special releases next Wednesday 10/29, in the meantime please enjoy our exclusive preview.

In-piece artwork from “Judge Dredd: Sorebone,” “Defoe: Frankensteiner” & “Rogue Trooper: The Feast.” Splash art: a detail from the cover. All art sourced from 2000 AD Winter Special, 2014.