2000 AD

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This is a /co/ related article, which we allow because we find it interesting or we can't be bothered to delete it.

I dare say, this page is delightfully British. Spot of tea?

2000 AD may be the single most famous comic book to come out of Britain, and stands proudly as Britain's answer to both Marvel Comics and DC Comics. Beginning in 1977 as a collaboration between Pat Mills and John Wagner to create a science fiction, fantasy, and Science Fantasy anthology comic series, 2000 AD was a spiritual successor to Action!, an anthology comics that had been hugely popular in the late 60s/early 70s before British censors killed it. Given its name in tongue-in-cheek mockery, as even its creators didn't believe it'd last the twenty three years until the calendar actually said 2000, the anthology actually became hugely popular. Working on 2000 AD has become a badge of honor amongst British comics writers and artists, and if a DC/Marvel author is British, they probably worked on 2000 AD before they crossed the pond.

Defining attributes of 2000 AD's various works include plenty of British comedy, especially satire and black comedy, lots of grimdark, deep (and often heavy-handed) philosophical themes, and lashings of violence and gore. In contrast to the supers universes of its American counterparts, 2000 AD's various universes tend to lean more towards the hard sci-fi end of the scale, and there's one universal rule: death is NOT cheap.

As a general rule of thumb, 2000 AD doesn't go for a single universe or even a single muiltiverse, unlike its American counterparts. Whilst some stories did spin off into their own self-contained universes (Judge Dredd being the most obvious, with fairly impressive library of spin-off titles and short species), as a general rule of thumb, the different universes aren't supposed to be considered part of each other.

...Unless Pat Mills wrote them. As the years passed, he grew very fond of going back and tying existing worlds together not just with recurring themes (Nemesis the Warlock has similar matriarchal neo-pagan magick elements as Slaine, for example) but by adding explicit references and characters. Other writers would blur these events but... look, this shit gets complicated, okay? Wikipedia literally has a page on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_AD_crossovers

Notable Titles

The list of titles that have run over 2000AD's lifespan is insane. Only Judge Dredd, which debuted in the second issue and has been in every single issue since, can be called an unbroken continuation, with others running sometimes for years before ultimately reaching their conclusion. Then there series like Tharg's Future Shocks, which was all about once-off stories to allow aspiring comic writers a chance to get their feet wet.